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The One Important Thing Missing From the Health Care Debate
Fortune: You may have seen the big news on health care: Aetna is going to stop offering individual health insurance policies on the health exchanges in 11 of the 15 states where it operates. Aetna AET -0.39% follows the lead of another large health insurer, United Health UNH -0.59% , which announced in April that it was withdrawing from almost all of the health insurance marketplaces where it operated. ... Language matters. Language focuses people’s attention. What senior managers talk about affects what their subordinates measure and emphasize, in the quest for leaders’ approval and individual career success.
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Like Humans, Chimps Reward Cooperation and Punish Freeloaders
Scientific American: Although humans love the playful ways and toothy grins of chimpanzees, our primate cousins have the reputation of being competitive, churlish and, at times, aggressive. New research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that despite being prone to occasional violent behavior, chimps actually much prefer cooperating over competing. In fact, the work shows that chimps work together at similar rates as humans—and that when violence does occur among apes, it is often directed toward an individual that is not being a team player. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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Teens Who Say No to Social Media
The Wall Street Journal: When 14-year-old Brian O’Neill of Washington, D.C., wanted to find out what his friends had been up to over summer vacation, he did something radical: He asked them. Unlike most kids his age, Brian isn’t on social media. He doesn’t scroll through his friends’ Instagram shots or post his own, nor does he use Facebook or Snapchat. “I don’t need social media to stay in touch,” he says. ... In a study published this spring in the journal Psychological Science, researchers created an Instagram-like program and then used fMRI scans to measure teens’ reactions to the photos that received more or fewer likes.
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What a Bad Decision Looks Like in the Brain
The Atlantic: Humans often make bad decisions. If you like Snickers more than Milky Way, it seems obvious which candy bar you’d pick, given a choice of the two. Traditional economic models follow this logical intuition, suggesting that people assign a value to each choice — say, Snickers: 10, Milky Way: 5 — and select the top scorer. But our decision-making system is subject to glitches. In one recent experiment, Paul Glimcher, a neuroscientist at New York University, and collaborators asked people to choose among a variety of candy bars, including their favorite — say, a Snickers. If offered a Snickers, a Milky Way and an Almond Joy, participants would always choose the Snickers.
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To Seem Better at Your Job, Ignore the Office Dress Code
New York Magazine: Regardless of your office’s dress code, there’s something to be said for showing up at work in a power suit. The clothes, to a certain extent, make the employee: Past research has shown that dressing more formally can help you focus, make you more confident, and even give you an edge in abstract, big-picture thinking. This last one, though, was a relative effect: People who dressed more formally at work became better at thinking abstractly, but only when they were more dressed up than everyone around them.
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Best Friends Build Shared Memory Networks
The Atlantic: I’ve known my two best friends since 9th grade. In that time, a lot has happened, and I’ve forgotten a lot of it. It’s not unusual now for one of them to say “Remember in high school, when this happened?” and for me to reply “Well now I do.” They’re always reminding me of things I’ve forgotten. They’re an extra hard drive for my limited memory capacity. In science, this is known as a transactive memory system. Transactive memory systems (TMS) are repositories of knowledge that are shared between two or more people. A shared memory of events, like with me and my friends, above, can be part of it, but it’s also a way of calling up facts that other people know.
