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Children Less Likely to Come to the Rescue When Others Are Available
Children as young as 5 are less likely to help a person in need when other children are present and available to help.
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God Is My Co-Pilot
Slate: When it comes to taming destructive impulses, God may be your best bet. Just ask those who have turned their lives around through Alcoholics Anonymous. AA’s iconic 12 steps are unabashedly spiritual, directing members to surrender their agency to a higher power in exchange for the strength to overcome their drinking-related demons. Though not everyone agrees with its focus on spirituality, AA is still the world’s most-used program for addiction recovery. The faith-based approach is no coincidence.
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The Benefits of No-Tech Note Taking
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The moment of truth for me came in the spring 2013 semester. I looked out at my visual-communication class and saw a group of six students transfixed by the blue glow of a video on one of their computers, and decided I was done allowing laptops in my large lecture class. "Done" might be putting it mildly. Although I am an engaging lecturer, I could not compete with Facebook and YouTube, and I was tired of trying. The next semester I told students they would have to take notes on paper. Period. I knew that eliminating laptops in my classroom would reduce distractions.
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Bosses Can Spot Self-Serving Workers
Supervisors are surprisingly accurate at distinguishing between employees who put in extra effort out of altruistic concern for the company, and those who suck up just to get ahead, according to a new study from a team of Canadian psychological scientists.
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Remembering a Crime That You Didn’t Commit
The New Yorker: In 1906, Hugo Münsterberg, the chair of the psychology laboratory at Harvard University and the president of the American Psychological Association, wrote in the Times Magazine about a case of false confession. A woman had been found dead in Chicago, garroted with a copper wire and left in a barnyard, and the simpleminded farmer’s son who had discovered her body stood accused. The young man had an alibi, but after questioning by police he admitted to the murder. He did not simply confess, Münsterberg wrote; “he was quite willing to repeat his confession again and again.
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How to enjoy your food more
The Boston Globe: Social psychologists often seem like killjoys when it comes to studying how people eat. A primary concern is overeating, so their main objective is frequently to try to identify the psychological levers that can be pulled to help people to eat less. This research has produced a number of pieces of now-familiar advice: Don’t eat while watching television (you lose track of how much you’ve consumed); serve food on small plates with small utensils to create the illusion of plenty. These days, however, food is a fetish, and some social psychologists have joined the fun.
