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How Humans Learn to Communicate With Their Eyes
The Wall Street Journal: The eyes are windows to the soul. What could be more obvious? I look through my eyes onto the world, and I look through the eyes of others into their minds. We immediately see the tenderness and passion in a loving gaze, the fear and malice in a hostile glance. In a lecture room, with hundreds of students, I can pick out exactly who is, and isn’t, paying attention. And, of course, there is the electricity of meeting a stranger’s glance across a crowded room. But wait a minute, eyes aren’t windows at all. They’re inch-long white and black and colored balls of jelly set in holes at the top of a skull.
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Zen and the Art of Cubicle Living
The Atlantic: One day recently I worked out of, quite possibly, the best office I have ever been in. Granted, this is not a high bar for a cubicle drone like me. Still, the design touches were lovely: It was a glass cube with an ergonomic green chair and mahogany desk. There was a frosted-glass door, so theoretically, I could have worked pants-less. (I was fully clothed.) The lighting was straight out of an ABC primetime family drama: a bright reading lamp to my left, a copper light above me, and another, softer light that glowed behind my laptop screen.
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The Sound of Status: People Know High-Power Voices When They Hear Them
Being in a position of power can fundamentally change the way you speak, altering basic acoustic properties of the voice, and other people are able to pick up on these vocal cues to know who is really in charge, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Hard To Think Straight: Processing Prejudice
We all have a bit of irrationality in us. Even if we think of ourselves as logical and deliberative, we still make decisions and judgments, based not entirely on the facts of the matter, but upon seemingly inconsequential information, random cues that we take from the world around us. Some of our irrational thinking is just quirky. For example, simply reading food labels in a difficult-to-read typeface can make us more fearful of food additives, while an easy-to-read label can diminish our perception of risk. We are more reluctant to ride roller coasters—and even to invest in new companies—with difficult-to-pronounce names.
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How to Maximize the 2 Most Productive Hours of the Day
Inc.: Wake up, smell the coffee, and get right to work. That should be your new mantra to start the day, according to Dan Ariely, a Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral economics. This week, Ariely conducted an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit where he revealed that generally people are most productive during the first two hours after becoming fully awake. Unfortunately, most people's morning routines and work schedules are not designed to maximize this bright-and-early potential. The first things we cross off our list in the mornings are the mindless tasks to prepare for the day ahead. Read the whole story: Inc.
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How ‘Solution Aversion’ and Global Warming Prescriptions Polarize the Climate Debate
The New York Times: Anyone eager to understand, and move past, the deep political polarization around global warming would do well to explore the findings in “Solution aversion: On the relation between ideology and motivated disbelief,” published in the November issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The paper is behind a subscription wall, but a Duke University news release does a fine job laying out the basic findings, as does Chris Mooney, getting into gear in his new blogging position at the Washington Post.
