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Harvard Psychologist: There’s A Good Chance Your New Year’s Resolution Will Do More Harm Than Good
Business Insider: With January 1 approaching, it's easy to get caught up in the excitement of seeing a new year as a fresh start, and maybe you have a New Year's resolution ready to go. But there's a good chance it could do more harm than good, says Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist and associate professor at Harvard Business School. "We're really bad at setting reasonable goals," she tells Business Insider. And when we don't meet an unreasonable goal, we fill ourselves with feelings of anxiety and lower our self-worth. We spoke with Cuddy about her research on the effects of goal-setting and how to avoid a resolution that will end up being a burden.
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Framed by forensics
Aeon: In 1992, Juan Rivera was arrested for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Waukegan, Illinois. On the night of the murder, Rivera was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet in connection with unrelated burglary charges, and this bracelet showed he’d been at home. Yet, based on a tip, police decided to arrest him. Rivera had a low IQ and a history of emotional problems, which psychologists knew would make him highly suggestible. The police chose to ignore that when they grilled him for several days and lied to him about the results of his polygraph test.
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How Headlines Change the Way We Think
The New Yorker: "Why Headlines Matter.” “Misleading Headlines Can Lead You Astray.” “How What You Read Affects What You See.” “How Bad Headlines Make Bad Memories.” “Eleven Reasons Headlines Are Important.” “You’ll Never Believe How Important an Accurate Headline Is.” Those are all possible titles for this piece that I discussed with my editor. And, actually, the one that we picked may be the most important part of this article. By now, everyone knows that a headline determines how many people will read a piece, particularly in this era of social media. But, more interesting, a headline changes the way people read an article and the way they remember it.
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Think You Found the Perfect Gift? Think Again
The New York Times: As you scour shopping websites and store aisles this season, captive to that frenzied, loving and exasperated hunt for perfect holiday gifts, here’s a little gift, of sorts, from researchers who study gift giving and receiving: Think gift card. Because the less specific the gift, the more it will be appreciated. You shudder, you recoil. But the sad truth is that while gift cards constitute a minority of holiday gifts, according to the National Retail Federation, they have been the most popular gift request since 2007. But you know your recipient best, right?
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The World Is Not Falling Apart
Slate: It’s a good time to be a pessimist. ISIS, Crimea, Donetsk, Gaza, Burma, Ebola, school shootings, campus rapes, wife-beating athletes, lethal cops—who can avoid the feeling that things fall apart, the center cannot hold?
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Political Extremists Are Resistant to One Kind of Bias
New York Magazine: We often think of political extremists as deeply biased people, and for good reason: They're stuck in their views and no amount of evidence is going to sway them. A new study in Psychological Science, though, offers an interesting example of how their certitude might protect them from one particular kind of bias. For the study, a team lead by Mark J. Brandt of Tilburg University in the Netherlands asked a bunch of people to participate in a so-called "anchoring task." This is a task in which researchers ask you to estimate a certain value based on a piece of information they give you.
