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Dan Ariely: How to Pay People
Bloomberg Businessweek: Most of the time, when you hire people you don’t want to specify exactly what they are to do and how much they would get paid—you don’t want to say if you do X you will get this much, and if you do Y you will get that much. That type of contract is what we call a complete contract. Creating one is basically impossible, especially with higher-level jobs. If you try to do it, you cause “crowding out.” People focus on everything you’ve included and exclude everything else. What’s left out of the contract tends to drop out of their motivation as well. You are taking away from their judgment and goodwill and teaching them to be like rats in a maze.
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Winners of MacArthur Foundation award include 10 people who focus on science
The Washington Post: Nine scientists and a science radio host were among the 22 people who received $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grants last week. Each year the MacArthur Foundation gives the no-strings-attached awards to innovative thinkers “to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers.” The 10 science-affiliated winners include: Matthew Nock, a clinical psychologist at Harvard, who studies suicide and self-injury in adults and adolescents and is seeking to disentangle the neurobiological aspects of self-harming behaviors from those that are dependent on cultural context.
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Let Students Sleep
New York Times: Efforts to improve educational outcomes through extending the school day may have unintended and counterproductive consequences if longer days are implemented by moving the school bell earlier or by pushing more homework later into the night. Young children are biologically primed for "early to bed and early to rise," but as children pass through middle school and into high school, biological processes keep them up later.
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Teens get smarter as their minds get quicker
Yahoo India: Washington, Sept 28 (ANI): A group of psychologists at University of Texas at San Antonio has found that adolescents become smarter because they become mentally quicker. This is the first time psychologists have been able to confirm this important connection. To find the relationship between these two phenomena, the UTSA psychologists analysed the results of 12 diverse intelligence and mental speed tests administered to 6,969 adolescents (ages 13 to 17) in the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Intelligence was measured by performance on cognitive tests of diverse abilities, such as vocabulary knowledge, math facts, and mechanical comprehension.
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Shocking “prison” study 40 years later: What happened at Stanford?
CBS News: It's considered one of the most notorious psychology experiments ever conducted - and for good reason. The "Stanford prison experiment" - conducted in Palo Alto, Calif. 40 years ago - was conceived by Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo as a way to use ordinary college students to explore the often volatile dynamic that exists between prisoners and prison guards - and as a means of encouraging reforms in the way real-life prison guards are trained. But what started out as make-believe quickly devolved into an all-too-real prison situation. Some student "guards" became sadistic overlords who eagerly abused the "prisoners," many of whom began to see themselves as real prisoners.
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How is Spanish soccer like GOP economics?
USA Today: The past year has been a triumphant one for Spanish soccer. The national team won the World Cup. Barcelona, whose players largely stocked the national team, took the Union of European Football Associations Cup, the most prestigious competition in club soccer. The Spanish under-19 team won the 2011 World Cup for the fifth time. And everywhere in the world, Spanish-style soccer was admired for its emphasis on teamwork, passing the ball and talented players working seamlessly together. There's just one problem: This year Spain's professional soccer league almost closed down.
