-
The Gregarious Salesman: Death of a Stereotype?
I had to buy a car recently, my first in many years, and I confess I couldn’t stop thinking about Jerry Lundegaard. Jerry Lundegaard is a Minneapolis car salesman, and the central character in the Coen brothers’ 1996 film classic, Fargo. He is fast-talking, weasely, dishonest. Played to great comic effect by William H. Macy, Lundegaard is a caricature of all that we expect and fear in those who are out to sell us something. Okay, so maybe some of this is my stereotyping of car salesmen, and perhaps I’m being unfair. But like a lot of stereotypes, mine has some basis in fact. Not the inept criminal part, but certainly the blustery, glad-handing, over-the-top enthusiasm.
-
Taste buds and ‘tude: The food and mood link
Los Angeles Times: Research sheds light on how food affects mood and the flip side: how emotions impact taste. All day, food metaphors weave their way into our thoughts about others. Watching someone cut in line may leave a bad taste in your mouth. Your current love may be the sweetest person you know. A growing body of evidence is making clear the links between what we taste and how we feel: Repulsion is repulsion, whether caused by a shameful act or a rotten egg. "Your brain can't tell the difference between something that tastes bad and something that makes you feel morally violated," says Kendall Eskine, a cognitive psychologist at Loyola University in New Orleans.
-
Science Study: verbally acknowledging fear helps dissipate it
Wired: According to a study published by a team of psychologists, telling a spider you are frightened of its ugly and terrifying self is the path to setting yourself free from a fear of arachnids. Methods of modifying human behaviour when it comes to battling fear range from shaping that behaviour through positive reinforcement or acclimatising an individual to a feared object through systematic desensitisation. Regulating emotions through positive verbal reinforcement is also a popular practice -- for instance, encouraging those afraid of spiders to approach the arachnid in question while repeating the words "that spider can't hurt me and I'm not afraid of it".
-
The Creativity of the Wandering Mind
Pacific Standard: Do you have a numbingly dull job, one so monotonous that you frequently find your mind wandering? Well, congratulations: without realizing it, you have boosted your creative potential. Mindless tasks that allow our thoughts to roam can be catalysts for innovation. That’s the conclusion of a research team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s META Lab (which focuses on Memory, Emotion, Thought and Awareness). Their research, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests putting a difficult problem in the back of your mind won’t, by itself, lead to creative thinking.
-
Can You Train Business School Students To Be Ethical?
Slate: A few years ago, Israeli game theorist Ariel Rubinstein got the idea of examining how the tools of economic science affected the judgment and empathy of his undergraduate students at Tel Aviv University. He made each student the CEO of a struggling hypothetical company, and tasked them with deciding how many employees to lay off. Some students were given an algebraic equation that expressed profits as a function of the number of employees on the payroll. Others were given a table listing the number of employees in one column and corresponding profits in the other.
-
Can You Learn While You’re Asleep?
NPR: If you're a student, you may have harbored the fantasy of learning lessons while you sleep. Who wouldn't want to stick on a pair of headphones, grab some shut-eye with a lesson about, say, Chinese history playing in his ears — and wake up with newly acquired knowledge of the Ming Dynasty? Sadly, it doesn't work. The history lesson either keeps you from going to sleep, or it doesn't — in which case you don't learn it. But researchers may have taken the first baby step to making the fantasy come true: In an unusual experiment published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers Anat Arzi, Ilana Hairston and others showed that people are capable of learning simple lessons while fast asleep.
