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The (Paradoxical) Wisdom of Solomon
King Solomon, the third leader of the Jewish Kingdom, is considered the paragon of wisdom and sage judgment. It’s said that during his long reign, people traveled great distances to seek his counsel. Yet it’s also true—and much less well known—that his personal life was a shambles of bad decisions and uncontrolled passions. He kept hundreds of pagan wives and concubines, and also loved money and boasted of his riches. He neglected to instruct his only son, who grew up to be an incompetent tyrant. All these sins and misjudgments contributed to the eventual demise of the kingdom.
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Offering a Range of Numbers Can Lead to an Edge in Negotiations
New research from Columbia Business School challenges conventional wisdom about making an initial offer during a negotiation. To get the best deal, you may want to consider offering a range of options rather than a single number. Whether bargaining for catering, a new car, or a starting salary, psychological scientists Daniel Ames and Malia Mason, found that when bargainers offered a modest range (asking for a starting salary of $50,000 to $54,000, for example) they secured better offers than when they suggested a single “point” number (say, $52,000). Ames and Mason found that certain types of range offers worked better than others.
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Step Outside Yourself
Slate: Mental health experts bombard us with advice to “focus on the present,” “savor the moment,” and “live in the now.” Prominent branches of meditation highlight the importance of being aware of the present moment, and research has demonstrated that the mind is unhappy when it wanders. The human tendency to leave the present moment, to mentally travel to different times or places, often faces criticism. For example, English author and columnist Terence Blacker warned of the “excessive sensibleness” of continuously planning for the future and stated, “Looking too much into the future can be as harmful as dwelling pointlessly on the past.
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Older and wiser? Some brain functions improve as we age
The Boston Globe: There is hope for aging baby boomers. The ability to recall names and faces with lightning speed may start to fade in one’s 20s, but our capability to perform other functions, such as learning new words, doesn’t peak until decades later, according to a new study by Boston scientists. Increasingly, researchers are discovering that the ability to reason, learn, and recall information ebbs and flows over our lifespan, and if a picture were drawn to depict these changes, the image would not be of a single line with a sharp, steep decline, but of a line with many curves that plateau at different stages.
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Hard Feelings: Science’s Struggle to Define Emotions
The Atlantic: When Paul Ekman was a grad student in the 1950s, psychologists were mostly ignoring emotions. Most psychology research at the time was focused on behaviorism—classical conditioning and the like. Silvan Tomkins was the one other person Ekman knew of who was studying emotions, and he’d done a little work on facial expressions that Ekman saw as extremely promising. “To me it was obvious,” Ekman says. “There’s gold in those hills; I have to find a way to mine it.” For his first cross-cultural studies in the 1960s, he traveled around the U.S., Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.
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Temptation in the Neurons
Lack of self-control is at the root of many personal and social ills, from alcoholism to obesity. Even when we are well aware of the costs, many of us are simply unable to curb our desires and control our impulses. Indeed, so daunting is this psychological challenge that an estimate four in every ten American deaths is attributed to self-control failure of one kind or another. Yet many other people do succeed at self-regulation, all the time and seemingly with ease. Why is that? Why, in the face of everyday temptation, do some individuals fail miserably while others coast by unscathed? Psychological scientists have been puzzling over this problem for years, but the answer remains elusive.
