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Not Everyone Wants to Be Happy
Scientific American: Everyone wants to be happy. It's a fundamental human right. It's associated with all sorts of benefits. We, as a society, spend millions trying to figure out what the key to personal happiness is. There are now even apps to help us turn our frowns upside down. So everyone wants to be happy—right? Well, maybe not. A new research paper by Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers from Victoria University of Wellington, argues that the desire for personal happiness, though knitted into the fabric of American history and culture, is held in less esteem by other cultures.
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Why Don’t More People Want to Donate Their Organs?
The Atlantic: In 1998, Adam Vasser, a 13-year-old teenager who loved playing baseball, was vacationing in Montana with his family when he suddenly came down with what felt like the flu. When he had trouble breathing and his ankles became swollen, his parents took him to a nearby clinic where the doctor on duty checked his vitals and sent him directly to the hospital across the street. By the time the family arrived at the hospital a few minutes later, Adam was in complete heart failure. For months, Adam waited in a hospital for a heart transplant, during which time his heart was only able to pump with the assistance of a left-ventricular assist device (LVAD).
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Humans have innate grasp of probability
Nature: People overrate the chances of dying in a plane crash and guess incorrectly at the odds that a coin toss will yield 'heads' after a string of several 'tails'. Yet humans have an innate sense of chance, a study of indigenous Maya people suggests. Adults in Guatemala who have never learned a formal number system or a written language did as well as formally educated adults and children at estimating the probability of chance events1, the researchers found. Children are born with a sense of number, and the roots of our mathematical abilities seem to exist in monkeys, chickens and even salamanders.
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When It Comes to Making Choices, Ignorance Really Can Be Bliss
New York Magazine: There is an established notion of the "happy idiot" — someone who doesn’t know a lot, knows he doesn’t know a lot, and doesn’t care. Think about Joey Tribbiani from Friends or Fry from Futurama. Though simple-minded and rather oblivious to their surroundings, both characters tended to come out on top. New research suggests that there may be something to this frequently invoked trope. Not knowing a lot — and being aware of your own ignorance — can make decisions easier and, as a result, lead to greater happiness. Decisions are a big part of life in the 21st century. Never before have we had to make so many of them.
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Great Vacation? Don’t Brag to Your Friends
The New York Times: Your friends don’t want to hear about your excellent adventures. While you may have gotten great pleasure from an epic event — sipping a rare wine in Burgundy, watching a Himalayan sunrise — that pleasure is all your own. A recent study in Psychological Science says that despite the thrills people receive from an extraordinary experience, few anticipate its potential social cost: exclusion by friends who would really rather not hear about it. Harvard researchers found that when people socialize, those who had the same experience, no matter how mundane, enjoyed chatting about it together.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Morality of Larks and Owls: Unethical Behavior Depends on Chronotype as Well as Time of Day Brian C. Gunia, Christopher M. Barnes, and Sunita Sah In 2014, Kouchaki and Smith published an article suggesting that people are more moral in the morning than they are in the afternoon. In this commentary, Gunia and colleagues examined whether differences in the patterns of people's circadian rhythms (i.e., chronotype) influence this phenomenon. Participants categorized as morning or evening people performed a task in either the morning or the evening in which they had the opportunity to cheat.
