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Revisiting the Land of Opportunity
The Huffington Post: "Our success should depend not on accident of birth, but on the strength of our work ethic and the scope of our dreams." So President Obama proclaimed in his 2014 State of the Union Address, adding: "Opportunity is who we are." Yet in the same speech, just a few paragraphs before, the president acknowledged that the American Dream is elusive for many: "Average wages have barely budged," he noted. "Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled." President Obama is not alone, neither in his yearning nor his gloom. Many Americans echo his view that economic realities are falling far short of the American Dream that defines our national ethos.
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Those Phone-Obsessed Teenagers Aren’t As Lonely As You Think
NPR: A recent dinner with my friends went something like this: "Wait, who is going to take a Snapchat of all of us when our drinks arrive?" "Oh no, I can't! My phone is dying." "Guys, this is such a stereotypical millennial conversation. I am totally tweeting about this." So I guess I understand why older folk fret that youngsters these days are losing out on authentic social connections because of social media. But it looks like the kids are going to be all right, researchers say. High school students in 2012 reported lower levels of loneliness than their counterparts in 1991, according to a studypublished Monday in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Do Men Overperceive Women's Sexual Interest? Carin Perilloux and Robert Kurzban Research has shown that men interpret women's levels of sexual interest as being higher than what women themselves report. In a series of surveys, women reported their sexual intentions, and men estimated the sexual intentions of women, on the basis of engagement in 15 different behaviors (e.g., cooked dinner, stared deeply into eyes, etc.). Men's estimations of women's sexual intentions were stronger than women's own ratings.
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Studying Office Social Networks to Improve Teamwork
The perception that an organization’s rules and policies are fair may be particularly important for people who work closely together in teams. When people perceive that they are being treated fairly by their organization, having a sense of what’s called “procedural justice,” they perform better as a team and show more positive behavior as individuals. But when the boss plays favorites, trust between teammates can plummet. In a recent study, psychological scientists Dong Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology), Morela Hernandez (University of Washington), and Lei Wang (Xi’an Jiaotong University) utilized a novel social network approach to studying teams.
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The Science of Interrogation: Rapport, Not Torture
Chris Matthews, who hosts the MSNBC news program Hardball, is convinced that torture works. In the last two days, in the wake of the Senate Intelligence Committee's damning report on CIA interrogation practices, he has allowed that so-called "enhanced interrogation" may be illegal and immoral, but he keeps reiterating versions of his belief that, for all that, it's effective in eliciting information from the enemy. That is, like it or not, it works. Except that it doesn't. Matthews is wrong about this. It's perhaps unfair to single Matthews out, since he is not alone in this unshakable belief that if you hurt somebody enough, they will tell you the truth.
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Study on Cultural Memory Confirms: Chester A. Arthur, We Hardly Knew Ye
The New York Times: Quick: Which American president served before slavery ended, John Tyler or Rutherford B. Hayes? If you need Google to get the answer, you are not alone. (It is Tyler.) Collective cultural memory — for presidents, for example — works according to the same laws as the individual kind, at least when it comes to recalling historical names and remembering them in a given order, researchers reported on Thursday. The findings suggest that leaders who are well known today, like the elder President George Bush and President Bill Clinton, will be all but lost to public memory in just a few decades.
