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Why We’re Living in the Age of Fear
Rolling Stone: Jen Senko believes that her father was brainwashed. As Senko, a New York filmmaker, tells it, her father was a "nonpolitical Democrat." But then he transferred to a new job that required a long commute and began listening to conservative radio host Bob Grant during the drive. Eventually, he was holing himself up for three hours every day in the family kitchen, mainlining Rush Limbaugh and, during commercials, Fox News. "It reminded me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers," Senko says.
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Even Small Distractions Derail Productivity
Interruptions don’t only take up time and increase error rates, they also degrade the overall quality of people’s work.
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$384,961.42 for a House? When Precise Bids Work and When They Backfire
Making a very precise offer for a car or a house may hurt your chances of success if you’re negotiating with someone who has expertise in that area, a series of studies shows.
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How to Get Beyond Our Tribal Politics
The Wall Street Journal: The most-watched made-for-TV movie in American history is “The Day After,” a 1983 portrayal of life in Kansas and Missouri in the days just before and after an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union. If you’ve had even fleeting thoughts that Tuesday’s election could bring about the end of the world or the destruction of the country, you might want to find “The Day After” on YouTube, scroll to minute 53 and watch the next six minutes. Now that’s an apocalypse. ... We think that it is. After all, civility doesn’t require consensus or the suspension of criticism.
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How Liars Create the Illusion of Truth
BBC: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Among psychologists something like this known as the "illusion of truth" effect. Here's how a typical experiment on the effect works: participants rate how true trivia items are, things like "A prune is a dried plum". Sometimes these items are true (like that one), but sometimes participants see a parallel version which isn't true (something like "A date is a dried plum"). ... Recently, a team led by Lisa Fazio of Vanderbilt University set out to test how the illusion of truth effect interacts with our prior knowledge. Would it affect our existing knowledge?
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Nudges That Help Struggling Students Succeed
The New York Times: When I was in high school, I earned A’s in all my math classes — until I took calculus. In algebra and geometry, I could coast on memorizing formulas, but now I had to think for myself. It was disastrous, culminating in my getting a charity “C,” and I barely passed my college calculus class. The reason, I was convinced, was that I didn’t have a math mind. I have avoided the subject ever since. It turns out that I got it wrong. While it’s unlikely that I could have become a math whiz, it wasn’t my aptitude for math that was an impediment; it was my belief that I had the impediment to begin with. Read the whole story: The New York Times
