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New Study Decodes When Working From Home Is Actually Productive
The Huffington Post: Working from home can be pretty great. You can send emails from the comfort of your couch and avoid commuting. Plus, away from the stress of the office, you might actually get more done while also enjoying better work-life balance. But remote working can also be ... well, not so productive. So far, scientists have reached somewhat mixed conclusions about the merits of WFH. Some studies have pointed to benefits like increased productivity, better performance on tasks, higher job satisfaction, lower work stress and an enhanced work-life balance. Others have found issues with the practice, including possible conflicts with family demands.
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Hope, the Quintessential Sports Fan Emotion
Pacific Standard: With the National Football League's first game of the season now behind us and the usual slew of games coming Sunday, psychologists have a helpful reminder for all the fans out there: Your team probably won't be as good as you think. That's because, as a new study reports, football fans collectively believe their favorite teams will win more than 300 games—something that's arithmetically impossible. Important an observation as that is, psychologists Bradley Love, Łukasz Kopeć, and Olivia Guest weren't primarily interested in football.
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Why the U.S. Government Is Embracing Behavioral Science
Harvard Business Review: For anyone interested in human behavior and decision making, September 15 will likely be a day to remember. On that day, President Obama ordered government agencies to use behavioral science insights to “better serve the American people.” In his executive order, Obama instructed federal agencies to identify policies and operations where applying findings from behavioral science could improve “public welfare, program outcomes, and program cost effectiveness,” design strategies for using behavioral science insights, and recruit behavioral experts whenever considered necessary or helpful.
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New Research on Overcoming Loneliness
The Wall Street Journal: I was feeling lonely one recent weekend. I craved company, but friends and family all seemed to be on vacation or busy. So I arranged to chat with a friend who lives in another city, signed up for a group kayak outing, and decided I’d take myself to Sunday brunch at a new restaurant nearby. Then I canceled my plans, ignored my phone when it rang and read for two days. It didn’t make me less lonely. I was relieved Monday morning when the rhythm of work started up again.
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The Aging Advantage
Pacific Standard: At the San Francisco offices of the global design firm IDEO, overlooking the blue expanse of San Francisco Bay, 150 people spend each workday bettering how we live by re-thinking everyday tangibles like IKEA kitchens, Tempur-Pedic mattresses, and, years ago, Crest toothpaste tubes. More recently, though, IDEO has started to think more widely about how we might engineer large cultural shifts in areas that aren’t traditionally thought of as “designable”—how we approach topics like religion, aging, and even death.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: An Enhanced Default Approach Bias Following Amygdala Lesions in Humans Laura A. Harrison, Rene Hurlemann, and Ralph Adolphs Monkeys that have amygdala lesions -- a part of the brain involved in memory, emotion, and learning -- show a tendency to approach stimuli that are normally considered threatening. The researchers examined whether amygdala lesions produce a general default bias to evaluate stimuli positively or a specific positivity bias -- in this case, a face-approach bias.
