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Think You Found the Perfect Gift? Think Again
The New York Times: As you scour shopping websites and store aisles this season, captive to that frenzied, loving and exasperated hunt for perfect holiday gifts, here’s a little gift, of sorts, from researchers who study gift giving and receiving: Think gift card. Because the less specific the gift, the more it will be appreciated. You shudder, you recoil. But the sad truth is that while gift cards constitute a minority of holiday gifts, according to the National Retail Federation, they have been the most popular gift request since 2007. But you know your recipient best, right?
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The World Is Not Falling Apart
Slate: It’s a good time to be a pessimist. ISIS, Crimea, Donetsk, Gaza, Burma, Ebola, school shootings, campus rapes, wife-beating athletes, lethal cops—who can avoid the feeling that things fall apart, the center cannot hold?
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Political Extremists Are Resistant to One Kind of Bias
New York Magazine: We often think of political extremists as deeply biased people, and for good reason: They're stuck in their views and no amount of evidence is going to sway them. A new study in Psychological Science, though, offers an interesting example of how their certitude might protect them from one particular kind of bias. For the study, a team lead by Mark J. Brandt of Tilburg University in the Netherlands asked a bunch of people to participate in a so-called "anchoring task." This is a task in which researchers ask you to estimate a certain value based on a piece of information they give you.
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Technology Is Ruining Our Memories—And Also Might Be Making Us Smarter
New Republic: With Facebook and cellphones, we no longer have to remember our friends’ birthdays or their phone numbers. A new study shows how all that forgetting might be a good thing. Saving information on a computer changes the way our brains store information, making it easier to learn something new, according to scientists at University of California, Santa Cruz. “By saving some information, people put themselves in a better position to remember other information,” the Psychological Science study says. Outsourcing info for later wasn’t invented with the PC, of course: writing a shopping list or scribbling on a post-it serve the same function.
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Distraction Is No Longer A Barrier For Learning
Gizmodo: Does your kid complain that he is unable to focus on his study because he is being distracted by things around him? If next time he says so, don't believe him. A new study, published in the journal Psychological Science, reveals that distraction doesn't affect learning process. "As long as our attention is as divided when we have to recall a motor skill as it was when we learned it, we'll do just fine," says the team of researchers at Brown University, US. For those of you who are not aware what motor skill means, here is a simple definition: it is a function, which involves the precise movement of muscles with the intent to perform a specific act.
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To make better food choices, wait before you decide
CTV News: Whether you choose celery or chocolate could be a question of how quickly your brain takes healthfulness into account, according to a new study by a team of neuroeconomists at the California Institute of Technology. "What we wanted to find out was at what point the taste of the foods starts to become integrated into the choice process, and at what point health is integrated," says lead author Nicolette Sullivan, a graduate student at Caltech.
