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Can science make you less sexist while you sleep?
The Washington Post: No matter how open-minded you think you are, you're chock-full of what scientists call implicit biases -- prejudices you don't even realize that you have that color your actions. But a fascinating new study suggests that these biases can be cut down in your sleep. By having subjects go through a bias-diminishing exercise just before taking a nap -- during which the things they'd just learned were cued up by special sounds -- researchers were able to lower their biases up to a week after the fact. The results were published Thursday in Science.
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In ‘Eating Lab,’ A Psychologist Spills Secrets On Why Diets Fail
NPR: As soon as Traci Mann's new book, Secrets From The Eating Lab, hit bookstores, I ordered my copy. As the author of a no-diet book myself, I was eager to read what one of the leading researchers on the psychology of eating, dieting and self-control had to say about why diets fail to bring about significant or sustainable weight loss. After all, Mann, who runs a lab at the University of Minnesota, has studied the scientific literature as well as her own diet subjects for two decades. She has concluded, among other things, that diets are unnecessary for optimal health. Read the whole story: NPR
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Are Poor Kids More Altruistic?
New York Magazine: Altruistic behavior toward strangers, a growing body of research has found, brings with it emotional and health benefits. This can help explain what has traditionally been seen as the "mysterious" aspect of the behavior — why help someone you don't even know or really care about? But as Jonas G. Miller, Sarah Kahle, and Paul D. Hastings of UC - Davis write in a new paper just published in Psychological Science, "less is known about the possible benefits ... of altruism in earlier childhood." To learn more about this, the researchers got a group of 74 preschoolers together for an experiment.
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Why Entrepreneurs Who Complain Are Setting Themselves Up to Fail
Entrepreneur: Your problems are proportional to the amount of time you spend complaining about your problems: The less you complain, the fewer problems you will have. This is because complaining about your problems keeps your attention on your problems. And attention generates force. ... The squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease. The squeaky wheel breaks down and gets replaced. If you want to attract failure, talk about your problems. If you want to attract success, talk about what makes you happy. A study published in the journal Psychological Science and reported in Science Daily examined how people responded to positive versus negative social media-status updates.
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How the Brains of ‘Super-Multitaskers’ Are Different
New York Magazine: Multitasking, we’ve been told constantly in recent years, is something human beings aren’t naturally good at. Even though technology has given us more opportunities than ever before to, say, work while checking in on an NBA score, or have a conversation while sending a text message, such multitasking works against the human brain’s natural strengths. When you try to do more than one thing at once, there’s an inevitable hit to your performance on all the tasks involved. That’s because it takes cognitive energy to switch between tasks — as I put it in 99U’s book on productivity, there is really no such thing as multitasking — there is only task-switching.
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The Neurology of Lending
The Huffington Post: Back in 1976 a young professor in Bangladesh starting making dubious low-interest loans to the rural poor of his country. Muhammad Yunus had the crazy idea that even impoverished farmers -- men and women without credit history or collateral or even steady employment -- could be disciplined and trustworthy in repaying small loans, and he founded the Grameen Bank to finance that vision. Many banks eventually followed Grameen's lead, despite some serious misgivings, and "microfinance" is now a huge global enterprise. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million men and women held microloans totaling $38 billion, and Grameen claims a repayment rate between 95 and 98 percent.
