-
3 Things Everyone Should Know Before Growing Up
NPR: With peak graduation season just behind us, we've all had the chance to hear and learn from commencement speeches — without even needing to attend a graduation. They're often full of useful advice for the future as seniors move on from high school and college. But what about the stuff you wish you'd been told long before graduation? Here are just three of the many things I wish I'd known in high school, accumulated at various points along the way to becoming a professor of psychology. Read the whole story: NPR
-
Anticipation: The Psychology of Waiting in Line
We all spend a lot of time waiting in lines—way more than we’d like. We wait for motor vehicle registration, for tables at popular restaurants, for Black Friday sales, groceries—and of course, we wait on hold for the cable company. It’s fair to say that most of this waiting is tedious and unpleasant. But what if we’re waiting for something new and exciting—a new curved-screen TV or that vacation to Tulum? Doesn’t waiting for new purchases become a positive experience, where we actually savor the anticipation so much that it trumps our impatience?
-
Mixed Motives May Mess Up Motivation
Many professionals are driven by a pure passion for their work, finding reward in simply doing a good job, delivering a great service, or producing a great product. For these people, their career is not
-
The Body Learns
Slate: Today’s educational technology often presents itself as a radical departure from the tired practices of traditional instruction. But in one way, at least, it faithfully follows the conventions of the chalk-and-blackboard era: EdTech addresses only the student’s head, leaving the rest of the body out. Treating mind and body as separate is an old and powerful idea in Western culture. But this venerable trope is facing down a challenge from a generation of researchers—in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, even philosophy—who claim that we think with and through our bodies.
-
Most men would rather shock themselves than be alone with their thoughts
The Washington Post: People, and especially men, hate being alone with their thoughts so much that they’d rather be in pain. In a study published in Science Thursday on the ability of people to let their minds “wander” — that is, for them to sit and do nothing but think — researchers found that about a quarter of women and two-thirds of men chose electric shocks over their own company. “We went into this thinking that mind wandering wouldn’t be that hard,” said Timothy Wilson, University of Virginia professor of psychology and lead author of the study. “People usually think of mind wandering as being a bad thing, because it interrupts when you’re trying to pay attention.
-
The Hidden Rules of Bigotry
The Huffington Post: Who is good? And who is better? We make these value judgments all the time, and for good reason, about individuals. But most of us have been taught not to make such judgments about groups of people. Equality is a core principle of American society, and it's unjust -- or at least politically incorrect -- to subscribe to social hierarchies. But such explicit hierarchies have played a powerful role in American history, and many believe that they still do -- in a more subterranean fashion.
