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Why Verbal Tee-Ups Like ‘To Be Honest’ Often Signal Insincerity
The Wall Street Journal: A friend of mine recently started a conversation with these words: "Don't take this the wrong way…" I wish I could tell you what she said next. But I wasn't listening—my brain had stalled. I was bracing for the sentence that would follow that phrase, which experience has taught me probably wouldn't be good. ... Certain phrases just seem to creep into our daily speech. We hear them a few times and suddenly we find ourselves using them. We like the way they sound, and we may find they are useful. They may make it easier to say something difficult or buy us a few extra seconds to collect our next thought. Yet for the listener, these phrases are confusing.
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Stop Trusting Yourself
The New York Times: TRUST is a double-edged sword. Though you can accomplish more in life if you put your faith in others, doing so also leaves you vulnerable. If your friend, business partner or political ally betrays you, he benefits — in terms of money, power or some other resource — at your expense. This risk is the drawback of trust, and it leads many people to prefer self-reliance, an arrangement that seems more secure because the only person you have to count on is yourself. ... Such misplaced trust typically occurs because of two cognitive glitches.
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Surgeon General Adds New Risks To Long List Of Smoking’s Harms
NPR: Acting Surgeon General Boris Lushniak is the latest in a long line of surgeons general who have tried to pound the final nails into the coffin of America's smoking habit. "Enough is enough," Lushniak says. But there's no reason to think his new report on smoking and health — the 32nd in a series that stretches back 50 years — will do the trick. Smoking's persistence isn't for lack of evidence about the harms it causes. The latest report, which tops 900 pages, contains an impressive list of disorders newly deemed to be caused by smoking.
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Parents: beware praise inflation
The Boston Globe: It’s natural for parents to want to heap praise on their children. But depending on the kid, it may not be as helpful as they might think. In a new study, researchers found that even though parents offered more inflated praise to children with lower self-esteem, children with low self-esteem were actually more motivated to challenge themselves after receiving non-inflated praise (“You made a beautiful drawing!”) than if they heard inflated praise (“You made an incredibly beautiful drawing!”) Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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Know Thy Avatar: Good and Evil in the Gaming World
The Huffington Post: The 2013 Ben Stiller film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a remake of a 1947 Danny Kaye movie of the same name, which was itself based on a popular James Thurber story, first published in The New Yorker in 1939. The enduring appeal of this tale reflects the human urge to try on another identity, to be someone else for a time, to play act. Walter Mitty is an ordinary, boring fellow going about his very ordinary day, but in his rich heroic daydreams he is everything from assassin to fighter pilot to ER surgeon extraordinaire. It's all good fun. But is it possible that such complete immersion in novel and extraordinary identities might have unintended consequences?
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Why baby talk is good for your baby
The Washington Post: The more parents exaggerate vowels and raise the pitch of their voices when talking to babies, the more the babies babble, new research shows. Common advice to new parents is that the more words babies hear, the faster their vocabulary grows. The new findings show that what spurs early language development isn’t so much the quantity of words as the style of speech and social context in which speech occurs. Researchers examined thousands of 30-second snippets of verbal exchanges between parents and babies.
