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How Much Sacrifice Is Your Reputation Worth?
Psychologist Abraham Maslow's famed “hierarchy of needs” says people seek food, shelter and safety before esteem and self-actualization. So what explains foolish dares and violent sports, in which people risk grave injury to pursue respect? New research suggests the hierarchy may be more fluid than we think—many individuals will undergo disgusting or painful ordeals to save their reputations. Andy Vonasch, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his colleagues conducted an online survey of 111 Americans about the value of reputation.
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Switching To Middle School Can Be Hard On Kids, But There Are Ways To Make It Better
"I'll be famous one day, but for now I'm stuck in middle school with a bunch of morons." That's harsh language from the downtrodden sixth-grade narrator of Diary of A Wimpy Kid, a blockbuster series of graphic novels. But it speaks to a broader truth. A large body of research suggests that students who go to middle school or junior high do worse academically, socially and emotionally, compared to the young teenagers who get to be the oldest students at schools with grades K-8. ... The negative effects were exaggerated for students from higher-income households. That surprised Elise Cappella, a lead author on the study and associate professor of applied psychology at New York University.
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How Fiction Becomes Fact on Social Media
Hours after the Las Vegas massacre, Travis McKinney’s Facebook feed was hit with a scattershot of conspiracy theories. The police were lying. There were multiple shooters in the hotel, not just one. The sheriff was covering for casino owners to preserve their business. ... For starters, said Colleen Seifert, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, “People have a benevolent view of Facebook, for instance, as a curator, but in fact it does have a motive of its own. What it’s actually doing is keeping your eyes on the site. It’s curating news and information that will keep you watching.”
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Review: The Cruel and the Kind
Everyone, it seems, is fascinated by psychopaths. They make up an estimated 1% to 2% of the population, so there may be more than six million of them in the U.S. alone. Most of them, of course, are not sadistic murderers like Hannibal Lecter, but they all have one thing in common: an abnormal lack of empathy. But what is the cause of that lack, and can it teach us anything about ordinary moral behavior? In “The Fear Factor,” Abigail Marsh, a psychologist and neuroscientist, describes her research into that question with great verve.
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Anxiety Makes It Harder to Listen to Your Intuition
As an anxious person, I find the mantra “go with your gut” endlessly frustrating. What’s so trustworthy about my gut instinct, which has, at various times, convinced me I’m dying of brain cancer, or about to get on an airplane doomed to crash, or destined to be alone forever? My therapist has had to remind me many times over that my so-called instincts have been wrong before and will be wrong again. But I’ve remained somewhat convinced that there is a “real” gut instinct somewhere beneath all my fake ones, and if only I knew how to access it, I would finally be perfectly wise, centered, and calm.
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Body Cam Study Shows No Effect On Police Use Of Force Or Citizen Complaints
Having police officers wear little cameras seems to have no discernible impact on citizen complaints or officers' use of force, at least in the nation's capital. That's the conclusion of a study performed as Washington, D.C., rolled out its huge camera program. The city has one of the largest forces in the country, with some 2,600 officers now wearing cameras on their collars or shirts. "We found essentially that we could not detect any statistically significant effect of the body-worn cameras," says Anita Ravishankar, a researcher with the Metropolitan Police Department and a group in the city government called the Lab @ DC.
