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Effect of Commitment on Forgiveness Investigated in Large-Scale Replication Project
After a betrayal of trust, what motivates an aggrieved partner to try and resolve the problem instead of walking away or seeking revenge? Many studies have indicated that how people respond to a partner's betrayal is associated with how committed they feel to their relationship, raising the possibility that boosting people’s feelings of commitment may lead them to choose less destructive responses. A new multi-lab research project aimed at replicating the primary evidence for a causal link between commitment and betrayal confirmed the association between feelings of commitment and responses to betrayal.
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Job Satisfaction Tends to Increase with Age
As we get older, does our work become more satisfying? New research illuminates an intriguing conundrum: Job satisfaction tends to improve as we get older but also tends to decrease the longer we stay at a particular job. “We demonstrated that age and tenure have opposite relationships with job satisfaction, such that job satisfaction increased as people aged yet decreased as tenure advanced — and received a boost when people moved to a new organization, thus starting the cycle anew,” writes psychological scientists Shoshana Dobrow Riza (London School of Economics and Political Science), Yoav Ganzach (Tel Aviv University), and Yihao Liu (University of Florida).
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How To Watch A Debate Without Bias
NPR: The first of three debates between Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will take place Monday night. The debates, sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, have the stated mission of offering "the best possible information to viewers and listeners" in the lead-up to the general election. There's just one problem. Decades of research suggests that voting decisions are influenced by quite a few factors beyond the "best possible information." For instance, people's perceptions of politicians can be influenced by their height: Taller men are, on average, perceived to be more competent. Using data from past U.S.
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Get Yourself to Do Stuff by Appealing to Your Own Sense of Pride
New York Magazine: A story at the start of Take Pride, a forthcoming book by University of British Columbia psychologist Jessica Tracy, is a typical one of youthful aimlessness, at least at first. Tracy writes about her post-college life in the late 1990s, when she moved across the country to San Francisco and got a job as a barista in a cozy cafe. It was a pleasant life, filled with lots of people to talk to and lots of time to read, along with few anxieties or responsibilities.
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When Economic Growth Doesn’t Make People Happy
The Atlantic: In 2013, UNICEF released a report comparing the well-being of children in 29 of the world’s most advanced nations. The report compiled data on health, safety, education, behavioral factors, living environments, material well-being, and subjective “life satisfaction” surveys from children themselves. The United States landed near the bottom on almost all measures, ranking 26th out of 29 countries; only Lithuania, Latvia, and Romania performed worse. ... In a 2009 study of 450,000 Americans, the economists Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman discovered that for Americans happiness seemed to level off at a household income level of $75,000.
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Scientists are furious after a famous psychologist accused her peers of ‘methodological terrorism’
Business Insider: The science of psychology is in crisis. One by one, many of its flashiest and most famous results have collapsed in the last decade as a new generation of researchers have re-examined famous findings. Forcing a smile can't really make you happy. The smell of chocolate cookies doesn't make you a better test taker. A robot named "statcheck" is trawling through published papers for statistical errors, and posting public comments when it finds them. It's a scary time to be a member of the psychological academic establishment. As the social psychologist Michael Inzlicht wrote on his blog back in February, "Our problems are not small and they will not be remedied by small fixes.