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Chris Christie and the Science of the Group Mind
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie finds himself in a position similar to many government and corporate leaders — apologizing for the misdeeds of his deputies, while at the same time claiming to have been misled by them. It is, in many ways, the safest position for an executive embroiled in an organizational scandal: Christie can cast himself as honorable by claiming responsibility, but not complicity. From Enron to the IRS, a number of companies and government entities have come under fire because of the missteps of senior executives. Like Christie, people at the top often plead ignorance to the actions of their deputies.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Multiple Levels of Bilingual Language Control: Evidence From Language Intrusions in Reading Aloud Tamar H. Gollan, Elizabeth R. Schotter, Joanne Gomez, Mayra Murillo, and Keith Rayner Bilingual individuals rarely make cross-language intrusion errors (i.e., unintentional language switches), which makes this phenomenon difficult to study. The authors examined how bilinguals control their language selection by examining the occurrence of these errors in mixed-language paragraphs.
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Study: inflated praise is damaging for children with low self-esteem
Wired: As counterintuitive as it may seem, a study has revealed that inflated praise given to children who are suffering from low self-esteem could be detrimental to their ability to overcome their feelings of inadequacy. Whilst children with high self-esteem are seen to flourish when given inflated praise, those with low self-esteem are more likely to spurn new challenges when they are too heavily praised. Inflated praise was defined in this research as an adverb, such as "incredibly", or an adjective, such as "perfect", attached to an already positive statement, resulting in an inflated evaluation of a child's performance.
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How Scarcity Trap Affects Our Thinking, Behavior
NPR: Let's hear now about a new book that explores a major source of stress. The book is called "Scarcity" and it's a look at what happens to us when we're pressured with too little time or too little money. The authors say "Scarcity" actually changes how we think. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam explains. Each September the state of Massachusetts asks one thing from "Scarcity" author and Harvard economist, Sendhil Mullainathan, to renew his car inspection sticker and each year this recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award does the same thing. He's really busy, so on each day leading up to the expiration of the sticker, he tells himself he'll attend to it the next day ...
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How Thoughts of Money Lead Us Astray
The Wall Street Journal: The New Year makes many of us think about time passing, and research shows that such thoughts often spur us to act more ethically. If we were to brood instead about the cash we're likely to blow on Dec. 31, our actions might be less upright. Two business professors from Harvard University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania conducted experiments in which some people were primed to think about money and others about time. Then the participants were given the opportunity to cheat anonymously. The results? Thinking about time led to much more honest behavior.
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See half a world and you can’t reason about the past
New Scientist: DRAW a line across a page, then write on it what you had for dinner yesterday and what you plan to eat tomorrow. If you are a native English speaker, or hail from pretty much any European country, you no doubt wrote last night's meal to the left of tomorrow night's. That's because we construct mental timelines to represent and reason about time, and most people in the West think of the past as on the left, and the future as on the right. Arnaud Saj at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and his colleagues wondered whether the ability to conjure up a mental timeline is a necessary part of reasoning about events in time.
