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We Know How You Feel
The New Yorker: Three years ago, archivists at A.T. & T. stumbled upon a rare fragment of computer history: a short film that Jim Henson produced for Ma Bell, in 1963. Henson had been hired to make the film for a conference that the company was convening to showcase its strengths in machine-to-machine communication. Told to devise a faux robot that believed it functioned better than a person, he came up with a cocky, boxy, jittery, bleeping Muppet on wheels. “This is computer H14,” it proclaims as the film begins.
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The Smart Way to Teach Children About Money
The Wall Street Journal: It’s time to rethink how we teach children about money. For all the effort parents put into helping their children understand dollars and cents, and for all the effort schools put into formal lessons in personal finance, most children still grow up into adults who can’t properly save, spend and budget. Now researchers—from psychologists to economists to communications experts—have started asking why. And the one theme that comes out of their research loud and clear is that we’re doing it all wrong. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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The Toddlers Are on to You
Pacific Standard: Your toddler might be even more perceptive than you think. New research suggests that children as young as 13 months can understand that people's judgments of their peers aren't always true or accurate. The claim is likely to remain controversial, but if correct, it suggests that human beings develop a deep understanding of the social world around them much earlier than previously thought. At issue is what psychologists call theory of mind. Roughly speaking, that’s the ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes and reason based on their beliefs, even if those beliefs are demonstrably false.
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Your friends could predict your lifespan: study
CTV News: Giving new meaning to the oft-uttered exclamation that your friends know you better than you think, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis say close friends know each other well enough to have an idea of how long the other will live. "You expect your friends to be inclined to see you in a positive manner, but they also are keen observers of the personality traits that could send you to an early grave," says Joshua Jackson, PhD, assistant professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences.
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Powerful People Think They Can Control Time
Time is supposedly the great equalizer. No matter how much money we make, how famous we are, or how much clout we yield in the office, we are all limited by the same number of hours in a day. However, a recent study from psychological scientists Alice Moon and Serena Chen of the University of California, Berkeley demonstrates that feeling a sense of power leads people to perceive themselves as able to control time, and that they have more of time at their disposal. “Given that the objective experience of time is uniform for everyone, it would seem safe to assume that all people perceive time in the same way,” Moon and Chen write in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
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Health and Marriage: The Cortisol Connection
Bad marriages can be sickening. Most people don’t have to be convinced of this, but for those who do, several decades of studies offer plenty of proof. Even so, very little is known about exactly how marriage quality affects health. Do strife and rudeness and neglect—and all the other signs of marital unhappiness—somehow get under the skin and trigger physical ailments? Or do warmth and trust and understanding and appreciation follow some biological pathway to wellness? Or both? Relationship experts have been focusing recently on marital partners’ beliefs about their marriage—specifically a partner’s belief that the other partner understands and cares for him or her.
