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The Seduction of a Sunny Day: How Weather Biases Car Buying Behavior
An analysis of 40 million car sales reveals the weather on the day of purchase can bias buyers towards choosing a car they may later regret.
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The Mechanics of Preventing Procrastination
The Atlantic: Procrastination is, in essence, stealing from yourself. The reason goals are so hard to reach, many psychologists think, is because each person believes they are really two people: Present Me and Future Me. And to most people, Future Me is much less important than Present Me. Present Me is the CEO of Me Corp, while Future Me is a lowly clerk. “Instead of delaying gratification,” people “act as if they prefer their current self’s needs and desires to those of their future self,” write psychologists Neil Lewis of the University of Michigan and Daphna Oyserman of the University of Southern California in a new study in Psychological Science.
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Speaking a Mile in Someone Else’s Shoes
Pacific Standard: In the midst of a debate over the potential cognitive benefits of learning a second language, new research suggests it may have social value as well. Actually, even being around people who speak different languages may help children learn to take others' perspectives, making communication more effective for everyone. "[E]xposure to multiple languages is, and has been for millennia, an integral part of human development," writes a team led by University of Chicago psychology graduate student Samantha Fan in Psychological Science.
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Two Ways to Take Better Notes
New York Magazine: If you ask ten people what the best way to take notes is, you'll probably get ten different answers. Ultraorganized note-takers (a group to which I cannot claim membership) come up with all sorts of crazy schemes involving bullet points and different-colored pencils and diagrams connecting ideas and so on. Others, like me, just use a series of dashes followed by semi-coherent summaries of ideas. Which systems work best? It's an open question, but one researchers are making progress on, and a new study in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition lends some helpful insights.
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Brains, Schools and a Vicious Cycle of Poverty
The Wall Street Journal: A fifth or more of American children grow up in poverty, with the situation worsening since 2000, according to census data. At the same time, as education researcher Sean Reardon has pointed out, an “income achievement gap” is widening: Low-income children do much worse in school than higher-income children. Since education plays an ever bigger role in how much we earn, a cycle of poverty is trapping more American children. It’s hard to think of a more important project than understanding how this cycle works and trying to end it. Neuroscience can contribute to this project.
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Two Hormones Predict Negotiators’ Success
New research recently published in Psychological Science demonstrates that two hormones can exert a strong influence over a bargainer’s success in a negotiation: testosterone and the stress hormone cortisol. Testosterone is often associated with aggressive behavior, so we might assume that the more testosterone the better when it comes to the bargaining table. However, driving a hard bargain is about more than maximizing your earnings; negotiators also have to worry about how their economic goals might conflict with their social ones. Being too financially aggressive in a negotiation can put a strain on the social relationship between a buyer and seller.
