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When rejection is the kindest thing a person can do
The Washington Post: Getting dumped is never fun. Neither is finding out that the crush you’ve been nursing is going nowhere. But when I think about all the times I’ve been rejected, the worst part wasn’t the moment of finding out the relationship was over. It was the part before — that awful stretch of uncertainty when I didn’t know whether the person I was into loved me or loved me not. There was the boy I dated in high school who went off to college and started seeing someone else. He couldn’t bring himself to tell me – for months – as I agonized over how hard it was to reach him on his dorm room phone. In the end, his best friend broke the news to me. ...
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The Rich Can Learn From the Poor About How to Be Frugal
The New York Times: I try to be frugal. But my instincts as a consumer are mistaken. Behavioral economics suggests that I’m often frugal in the wrong way and that you may be, too. Consider this situation: You’re shopping for headphones. An electronics store has the model you want for $50, a reasonable price. But a sales clerk says: “You know our other branch has this item on sale for $40.” Going to that store will take 30 minutes, and you can’t buy the headphones for that price online. Do you go to the other branch? ...
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How People Learn to Become Resilient
The New Yorker: Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any.
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In Real-Estate, ‘Love’ Hurts and ‘Sexy’ Sells
The Wall Street Journal: In luxury real estate, love is cheap and sex sells. An analysis of roughly 1.6 million home listings found that lower-priced homes were most likely to have the word “love” in property descriptions, while homes priced in the millions of dollars were most likely to have “sexy” and “seductive” in the descriptions. “Love is basic,” said Javier Vivas, an economic researcher for Realtor.com, which analyzed the data. “It’s a pre-canned pitch to generically describe something beautiful.” ...
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Five myths about love
The Washington Post: Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is...detectable on an fMRI scan? Poets have written about love for millennia, but only recently has it become a subject of serious scientific pursuit. Psychologists, biologists, economists and anthropologists are all investigating the role of love in our lives and our culture. The poets, it turns out, have gotten a lot right (for example, the metaphor of love as a kind of madness gained credence when one study found a chemical resemblance between romantic love and obsessive-compulsive disorder ). But we still have a lot to learn. Maybe love will always be part myth, but it’s worth debunking a few of our more outdated ideas. ...
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Who’s right? Who’s left?
The Boston Globe: THE LEFT-VERSUS-RIGHT labeling in our political discourse is so ingrained in our minds that our sense of political differences can be undermined by switching sides — literally. In October 2012, researchers asked people to rapidly identify whether a picture was of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. One set of participants categorized the pictures by using the left hand to press the “Q” key for Obama and the right hand to press the “P” key for Romney; another set of participants categorized the pictures by using the left hand to press the “Q” key for Romney and the right hand to press the “P” key for Obama. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
