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People Are Overly Confident in Their Own Knowledge, Despite Errors
A collection of new studies confirms that overprecision is a common and robust form of overconfidence driven, in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments.
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The Power Of Rituals In Eating, Grieving And Business
Forbes: All over the world, people in pain turn to rituals in the face of loss—no matter if it’s the death of a loved one (dressing in black, for example), the end of a relationship (burning old love letters), or the crushing defeat in a Little League baseball game (graciously shaking hands with the winning team). But what’s the point? Behavioral scientist Michael I. Norton became interested in mourning rituals after reading Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, which describes elaborate ways that parents, spouses, children, and friends dealt with the massive loss of soldiers during the American Civil War.
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Distracted Dining Increases Desire for Sugary, Salty Foods
Pacific Standard: Our eating habits have changed radically in recent decades, in at least two distinct ways. We increasingly multitask as we consume our meals, munching as we work at our desk or watch television. And, to the dismay of nutritionists, our food has higher concentrations of sugar and salt. New research from the Netherlands suggests the two phenomena may be directly related. A study just published in the journal Psychological Science finds people eating or drinking while mentally distracted require greater concentrations of sweetness, sourness, or saltiness to feel satisfied.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science. Maternal Stress and Infant Mortality: The Importance of the Preconception Period Quetzal A. Class, Ali S. Khashan, Paul Lichtenstein, Niklas Långström, and Brian M. D'Onofrio Does exposure to preconception and prenatal stress affect levels of infant mortality? Researchers examined women who had experienced a stressful event (death of a first-degree relative) in the 6 months prior to conception and during pregnancy. They found that preconception stress was associated with an increased risk for infant mortality. No relationship was found between stress during pregnancy and risk of infant mortality.
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Students Can Learn by Explaining, Studies Say
Education Week: Children are quick to ask “why?” and “how?” when it comes to new things, but research suggests elementary and preschool students learn more when teachers turn the questions back on them. In a symposium at the annual Association for Psychological Science research meeting here this month, panelists discussed how and when asking students for explanations can best enhance their learning. “Often students are able to say facts, but not able to understand the underlying mathematics concept, or transfer a problem in math to a similar problem in chemistry,” said Joseph Jay Williams, a cognitive science and online education researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Smile: You Are About to Lose
Scientific American: The posed stare-down is a staple of the pre-fight ritual. Two fighters, one day removed from attempting to beat the memories from each other, stand impossibly close, raise their clenched fists and fix their gaze on the other’s eyes as cameras click away. This has always seemed little more than a vehicle for media hype, but new research from psychologists at the University of Illinois suggests that there may be clues in this bit of theatre that predict the results of the fight to come. Specifically, the researchers hypothesized that there’s something about the fighters’ facial expressions in this standoff that reveal the competitive dynamics between them.
