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Self-proclaimed ‘experts’ more likely to fall for made-up facts, study finds
The Washington Post: If you consider yourself an expert in something or another, you might want to stop pretending you understand things you've never heard of. In a new study, researchers found that self-proclaimed "experts" in a topic were more likely than others to profess knowledge of terms that were actually made up for the purpose of the study.
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The Kindness Cure
The Atlantic: How do you cultivate compassion? How do you ensure that at the end of the day, it’s your kindness and generosity for which you’ll be remembered? It’s a good question, for as much as we all agree that compassion is a virtue to be admired, as a society, we don’t seem to be very effective at instilling it. In fact, research by Sara Konrath at the University of Michigan suggests we’re actually getting worse on this score. In reviewing the results of a standard assessment of empathy and compassion taken by 13,000 college students between 1979 and 2009, Konrath discovered that self-reported concern for the welfare of others has been steadily dropping since the early 1990s.
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Having Wealthy Neighbors May Skew Beliefs About Overall Wealth Distribution
Wealthy people may be likely to oppose redistribution of wealth because they have biased information about how wealthy most people actually are, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association
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Daniel Kahneman: ‘What would I eliminate if I had a magic wand? Overconfidence’
The Guardian: Daniel Kahneman is the very definition of unassuming: a small, softly spoken man in his 80s, his face and manners mild, his demeanour that of a cautious observer rather than someone who calls the shots. We meet in a quiet spot off the lobby of a London hotel. Even then I have trouble catching every word; his accent hovers between French and Israeli and his delivery is quiet, imbued with a slightly strained patience, helpful but cautious. And yet this is a man whose experimental findings have shifted our understanding of thought on its axis – someone described by Steven Pinker as “the world’s most influential living psychologist”.
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How to stay happy after the vacation is over
CNN: The sad thing about vacations is that they end. However much fun you're having at the beach or carving down a ski mountain or at your sustainable carbon-neutral ecolodge in the rainforest, the specter of your trip home and the resumption of normal day-to-day annoyances is always right there. And as Jennifer Senior pointed out last year, there is indeed a fair amount of research showing that shortly after you return from a vacation, your happiness level bounces back to where it was beforehand.
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Why I give my students a ‘tragedy of the commons’ extra credit challenge
The Washington Post: Imagine you’re a student and your teacher poses this challenge to the entire class: You can each earn some extra credit on your term paper. You get to choose whether you want 2 points added to your grade, or 6 points. But there’s a catch: if more than 10% of the class selects 6 points, then no one gets any points. All selections are anonymous, and the course grades are not curved. I pose this exact challenge to students each semester in my social psychology course at the University of Maryland. This summer, one of my students happened to tweet about it, and his reaction went viral.
