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The Right Face for the Job
Picking a leader should be about assessing the experience and skills an individual can bring to the table, but a new study finds that getting ahead may be easier for people with the right facial features. In a study published in The Leadership Quarterly, psychological scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, Warwick Business School, and West Point Military Academy found that people were surprisingly good at matching leaders’ faces to their real professions. Study authors Christopher Y. Olivola, Dawn L. Eubanks, and Jeffrey B. Lovelace suggest that we may be choosing leaders, at least in part, based on unconscious biases towards certain facial features.
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Hungry? Don’t Go Shopping.
Hunger is one of our most basic and primitive drives. When we are deprived of food, for whatever reason, we become intensely focused on satiating that craving. We want calories, and we want them now. Everything else—including time and money—is merely an aid for finding and acquiring rich, caloric food. This makes sense. It’s survival. Yet beyond this fundamental drive for satiety and nutrition, surprisingly little is known about hunger’s influence on our behavior. New research suggests that hunger’s power may extend beyond eating and nutrition, indeed that it may influence judgments and decisions completely unrelated to those stomach pangs.
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Neck Pain Can Be Changed Through Altered Visual Feedback
Using virtual reality to distort how far the neck is turned can actually alter the experience of chronic neck pain.
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Brian Williams Suspended For It, But Everybody Embellishes
Associated Press: Brian Williams had been a trusted voice in news for decades, until questions arose last week about his credibility when he admitted he embellished a story he covered in Iraq. Some speculate that the NBC news anchor started telling tall tales to appear more interesting as he made the rounds on the late-night talk shows. Others suggest he caved to the pressure to sound anything but boring in an insatiable social media-driven society. Williams was suspended Tuesday by the network for six months for stretching the truth, a stunning fall from grace, but he's far from alone.
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In Defense of Tinder
The New York Times: IS the smartphone revolution sullying the online dating world? The old paradigm for online dating was a website like eHarmony or Match.com. Courtesy of an elaborate algorithm, you studied detailed profiles of potential dates, initiated contact through an anonymized email system and, if you got a response, began a conversation that might lead to a date. Perhaps with your future spouse. The new paradigm is a mobile app like Tinder. You quickly browse photos on your phone, swiping to the right if the photo appeals, to the left if it doesn’t. If the attraction is mutual — that is, if both of you have swiped right — you might try to set up a date for, say, five minutes later.
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We Know Why You’re Always Late
The Wall Street Journal: Chronically late people can be frustrating and baffling to anyone stuck waiting for them. One main explanation for their behavior is deceptively simple, psychologists say: People simply underestimate how long a task will take. That’s a little-known concept called the planning fallacy, which is a strong tendency to chronically underestimate task completion. The planning fallacy is one of the most difficult behavioral patterns to change, experts say. “This is a judgment that you’d think that people would be motivated to get right,” said Justin Kruger, a social psychologist and professor in the marketing department at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
