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Why You Can’t Concentrate at Work
The Wall Street Journal: After taking down walls to create open offices and foster lots of interaction and collaboration, some companies are finding they’ve done the job too well. All of this social engineering has created endless distractions that draw employees’ eyes away from their own screens. Visual noise, the activity or movement around the edges of an employee’s field of vision, can erode concentration and disrupt analytical thinking or creativity, research shows. While employers have long tried to quiet disruptive sounds in open workspaces, some are now combating visual noise too. The answer could be as low-tech as strategically placed plants or more drab wall colors.
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Is This How Discrimination Ends?
The Atlantic: On a cloudy day in February, Will Cox pointed to a pair of news photos that prompted a room of University of Wisconsin, Madison, graduate students to shift in their seats. In one image, a young African American man clutches a carton of soda under his arm. Dark water swirls around his torso; his yellow shirt is soaked. In the other, a white couple is in water up to their elbows. The woman is tattooed and frowning, gripping a bag of bread. Cox read aloud the captions that were published alongside these images of a post-Katrina New Orleans.
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‘Just Show Up’: Sheryl Sandberg On How To Help Someone Who’s Grieving
NPR: Two years ago, life was good for Sheryl Sandberg. The Facebook senior executive and mother of two had a best-selling book (Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead) and she and her husband, Dave Goldberg, decided to take a vacation. But on that vacation, Goldberg collapsed at the gym from heart failure and died. He was 47 years old. Sandberg went through a period of darkness after her husband's death. She turned to professionals and friends for help getting through it, and now she's written a book with one of those professionals, psychologist Adam Grant. It's called Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy. Read the whole story: NPR
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Forget Calories. Exercise for Awe.
The New York Times: SYDNEY, Australia — If you joined the hundreds of people in my swim squad, you might think at first that the routine was simply about getting a solid bout of exercise before the day begins. We meet after sunrise at Manly Beach, swim out to the headland, then arc across a protected marine bay to another beach. The caps we wear are bright pink. The name we call ourselves, the Bold and Beautiful, is also quite daft, but it’s a reminder that the squad was formed several years ago by middle-aged women who were too nervous to swim the distance alone. This morning swim was never about skill, but about pluck. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Encouraging Authors to Share Their Data with Reviewers for ‘Psychological Science’
Methodspace: The journal Psychological Science is taking steps to encourage would-be authors to give reviewers easy access to the data underlying the analyses reported in their manuscripts. This is part of a wider effort to promote transparency and replicability in works published in the journal. I discussed the rationale for encouraging authors to share data and materials in a recent editorial, “Sharing Data and Materials in Psychological Science.” Here I briefly highlight some of the principle points.
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Don’t think with your hormones
The Boston Globe: Even controlling for their performance on an arithmetic test, men who were randomly given a dose of testosterone subsequently exhibited worse performance on the “Cognitive Reflection Test.” The questions on the latter test require careful deliberation, like “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
