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Logic Trumps Gut Instinct in Peer Reviews of Decision Makers
When faced with making a tough decision do you tend to trust your gut, or do you logically review all the facts? In a recent study, psychological scientists Nicole L. Wood and Scott Highhouse of Bowling Green State University examined whether we can distinguish between “good” decision makers and “bad” decision makers by analyzing people’s go-to decision making style. Are rational decision makers seen as making better choices than people who follow their intuition? One model for looking at decision-making, the General Decision-Making Style (GDMS), identifies five major styles that people use in making decisions: rational, intuitive, dependent, avoidant, and spontaneous.
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Crossing Class Lines
The New York Times: In a society as unequal as ours, people tend to interact almost exclusively with people who share similar educational histories, incomes and occupations — and when they do interact with others from different social classes, even as friends, those relationships seem fraught with misunderstanding and tension. That’s partly a matter of circumstance, but it’s also a matter of habit. As the comedian Kevin Hart jokes, “I stay in my lane, people. I stay in my financial lane.” In such a bifurcated society, what happens when people from one social class cross lanes? Can we speak to, engage with and understand those whose lives are more or less fortunate than our own?
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Are Workplace Personality Tests Fair?
The Wall Street Journal: Workers who apply online at RadioShack Corp. must say if they agree with the statement: "Over the course of the day, I can experience many mood changes." Lowe's Cos. asks job seekers if they "believe that others have good intentions." A test at McDonald's Corp. said: "If something very bad happens, it takes some time before I feel happy again." The use of online personality tests by employers has surged in the past decade as they try to streamline the hiring process, especially for customer-service jobs.
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Your Fellow Diners’ Size May Affect How Much You Eat
NPR: Your dining companion may have more influence over your eating habits than you realize. We've known that people often have friends with similar body weights, but new research suggests that dining with an overweight companion may make us more likely to eat more unhealthful food. A study in the appropriately named journal Appetite finds that undergraduates who were offered pasta and salad while eating near a 5-foot-5-inch, 126-pound woman would eat more pasta when she was zipped into a fat suit adding 50 pounds, or about 8 points, to her body mass index.
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The Enforcers of the Death Penalty
The Atlantic: It was the late 70s, and Kathleen Dennehy was working at Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord, the oldest running men's prison in the state. Opened in 1878, it has a vault filled with corrections records dating back to the turn of the century, both from the now-demolished state prison that preceded it and from MCI-Concord's prison cemetery. The weathered papers include death certificates, sentencing documents, and other records, including those of Sacco and Vanzetti, the famous 20's anarchists ostensibly sentenced to death for first-degree murder, but whose larger crime was being Italian.
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Helping Kids Take Criticism Constructively (Even When It Isn’t Constructive)
The New York Times: Parents and teachers spend an enormous amount of time thinking about how to frame feedback for kids. We’re torn between the desire to teach and the urge to protect children from pain. In an attempt to make feedback palatable, we dress it up in pretty outfits, sand down its sharp corners and construct feedback sandwiches of critical meat between slices of fluffy and comforting praise. We all face criticism, both constructive and destructive, but how we deal with that criticism determines whether we persevere and learn from experience or crumple under the weight of our own self-loathing and despair.
