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What really drives you crazy about waiting in line (it actually isn’t the wait at all)
The Washington Post: If the people who study the psychology of waiting in line — yes, there is such a thing — have an origin story, it’s this: It was the 1950s, and a high-rise office building in Manhattan had a problem. The tenants complained of an excessively long wait for the elevator when people arrived in the morning, took their lunch break, and left at night. Engineers examined the building and determined that nothing could be done to speed up the service. Desperate to keep his tenants, the building manager turned to his staff for suggestions.
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Three Tactics for Tackling Unethical Behavior
Unethical behavior isn’t necessarily the price of doing business. An international research team highlights steps organizations can take to combat unethical behavior on the job.
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Virtue, Vice, and the U.S. Senate
NPR: To Aristotle, the ideal politician was a person of high virtue, one of the best and most capable members of society. Though Machiavelli also used the word "virtue" to describe his own ideal, he obviously meant something different, more akin to a paranoid, power-hungry psychopath. The contrast leads to an obvious question: Which of these two has more influence in the United States Senate? Good news: While the more Machiavellian may have power early in their careers, according to a new study, it's the courageous and wise senators who have the most influence as they move up the ranks. ...
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Why it’s good to show you’re embarrassed
The Washington Post: Maybe you asked a woman when she was due, only to learn that she wasn’t pregnant. Perhaps you accidentally "replied all" with an inappropriate remark, or walked right into a sliding glass door at a busy restaurant. We all have embarrassing moments. And in the age of the Internet, a lot of them are preserved for posterity — 50 Cent’s hilariously failed pitch at a Mets game, for example, or Katy Perry slipping over and over again in a pile of cake, and then having to crawl off stage.
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Loneliness Destroys Physical Health From The Inside Out
Forbes: Loneliness can increase the risk of premature death in older adults by 14%, claims a major new study supported by the National Institutes of Health. The results expand a growing understanding of the potential for loneliness to damage physical health along with psychological health. What the research team found is that perceived social isolation—the “feeling of loneliness”—was strongly linked to two critical physiological responses in a group of 141 older adults: compromised immune systems and increased cellular inflammation.
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Plight of the Funny Female
The Atlantic: A few years ago, Laura Mickes was teaching her regular undergraduate class on childhood psychological disorders at the University of California, San Diego. It was a weighty subject, so occasionally she would inject a sarcastic comment about her own upbringing to lighten the mood. When she collected her professor evaluations at the end of the year, she was startled by one comment in particular: “She’s not funny,” the student wrote. ... “Men are willing to take more risks [in humor], and they also fail more miserably,” Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist with Aberystwyth University in Wales and author of the 2011 study. But for the man, “it's worth it.
