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Why Your Name Matters
The New Yorker: In 1948, two professors at Harvard University published a study of thirty-three hundred men who had recently graduated, looking at whether their names had any bearing on their academic performance. The men with unusual names, the study found, were more likely to have flunked out or to have exhibited symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with more common names. The Mikes were doing just fine, but the Berriens were having trouble. A rare name, the professors surmised, had a negative psychological effect on its bearer. ... That view, however, may not withstand closer scrutiny.
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‘Affluenza’: Is it real?
CNN: Attorneys for Texas teen Ethan Couch claimed that his "affluenza" meant he was blameless for driving drunk and causing a crash that left four people dead in June. Judge Jean Boyd sentenced him Tuesday to 10 years of probation but no jail time, saying she would work to find him a long-term treatment facility. ... But the term highlights the issue of parents, particularly upper-middle-class ones, who not only refuse to discipline their children but may protest the efforts of others -- school officials, law enforcement and the courts -- who attempt to do so, said Suniya Luthar, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University.
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Women Will Tolerate Sexually Explicit Ads — at the Right Price
Harvard Business Review: Kathleen D. Vohs, the Land O’Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and her colleagues set up a study in which men and women viewed advertisements for wristwatches. One of the watches was priced low, at $10; the other ran for $1250. The subjects viewed each watch against both a simple mountain backdrop and a sexually explicit scene. So do women ever think sex sells? Professor Vohs, defend your research. When men and women view sex-based ads featuring a cheap watch versus an expensive one, their reactions differ. Men’s reactions don’t vary much, regardless of how much the watch costs.
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The ritual of eating chocolate is almost as important as the chocolate itself
The Telegraph: Fascinating recent research suggests that rituals associated with food and drink enhance the enjoyment of what is consumed. Writing in the journal Psychological Science, Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota suggests that such rituals – clinking glasses of wine, shaking a little pack of sugar before adding it to coffee – ensure that people are paying proper attention to the food or drink when they get to it, which makes it taste better. Naturally Professor Vohs turned to chocolate to test her hypothesis, and had her subjects unwrap a bar in a systematic manner before consuming it.
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Residents of poor countries have greater sense of meaning in life than those in rich nations, research says
PBS: According to new research, people living in poor countries have a greater sense of meaning in their lives than those living in wealthy countries. These new findings, published in the Association for Psychological Science's academic journal "Psychology Science," suggest that this greater sense of life meaning stems from residents' strong family ties and solid connections to religious tradition. "Thus far, the wealth of nations has been almost always associated with longevity, health, happiness, or life satisfaction," Shigehiro Oishi, a professor at the University of Virginia and original publisher of this study, said.
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Americans Are Terrible at Estimating Income Inequality
The Atlantic Cities: Income inequality is an abstract idea, measurable in many ways. And so perhaps it's not surprising that Americans are terrible at estimating the true extent of the problem (or how fast it's grown with time). The question, after all, requires several mental leaps: from our own income, to a sense of where we fit on the national scale, to an awareness of the outer poles of that distribution. There are some serious math and reasoning skills required here. You may be surprised, though, by exactly how – and how consistently – people get this wrong: A new study in the journal Psychological Science from researchers at St.
