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Shop Yourself Happy
The Atlantic: This year, a few pure souls might celebrate a freegan Christmas. Some will opt for a "Buy-Nothing" holiday. Others still will pull off a DIY Hanukkah. The vast majority of people who have some disposable income, however, will do what all the glossy store catalogs implore this time of year and "SHOP NOW." Even among those who think that Black Friday insanity, and holiday consumerism in general, are terrible, the default setting during December is to buy things. Behavioral economists have been puzzling for years over how much and what kinds of spending provides the biggest happiness boost for the buyer.
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Study Shows Riding The Quiet Car Is Crushing Your Spirit
NPR: An experiment in Chicago randomly assigned train and bus riders to either talk to the stranger next to them or commute quietly. The result? Even for introverts, silence leaves you sadder. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Many of us have some way to occupy ourselves on our commute. We may sip a cup of coffee in the drink holder. We may listen to the radio. If you ride the train to work, you have other options. You can sit in solitude reading, looking at your phone or you can talk to the person next to you. So which would make you happier? NPR's Shankar Vedantam joins us each week on this program. He's here with an answer. Hi, Shankar. Read the whole story: NPR
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5 Reasons Why You Give Such Awful Presents
Time: We’ve all suffered through that awkward silence at least once, the one that comes right after someone opens the holiday gift that you selected—and that’s somehow not quite right. In fact, it’s a horrible gift. It’s inappropriate, thoughtless, silly, or otherwise ill-considered. Depending on the manners of the recipient, the reaction to the presentation of such a gift might be a forced squeal of delight, an overly broad, stiff smile, or a quick, flat “thank you” tinged with a touch of confusion. Or something far worse. But there’s no getting around the fact that, as far as presents go, this one has been deemed pretty awful. How could this have happened, you wonder?
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Psychology: A simple trick to improve your memory
BBC: If I asked you to sit down and remember a list of phone numbers or a series of facts, how would you go about it? There’s a fair chance that you’d be doing it wrong. One of the interesting things about the mind is that even though we all have one, we don't have perfect insight into how to get the best from it. This is in part because of flaws in our ability to think about our own thinking, which is called metacognition. Studying this self-reflective thought process reveals that the human species has mental blind spots. One area where these blind spots are particularly large is learning. We're actually surprisingly bad at having insight into how we learn best. Read the whole story: BBC
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Bad Drivers? No, Just Bad Stereotypes
Ugly stereotypes about “bad drivers” creep into pop culture, jokes, and slurs on a regular basis. The pernicious stereotype of “bad Asian drivers” has made its way into popular TV shows like Family Guy and websites like Urban Dictionary. In August of 2014, an Australian politician publicly apologized for stating that Asian drivers had “no comprehension” of the road rules, according to The Guardian. However, research on traffic accidents actually shows that many of the groups who are often stereotyped as “bad drivers” -- women, Asians, and the elderly -- are actually less likely to get into accidents or break traffic laws than are people from other demographic groups.
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Americans are obsessed with parenting advice. So why are our kids so miserable?
The Washington Post: Americans are obsessed with parenting advice. Bloggers, magazines, whole Web sites urge us to do more. Or less. Be more Chinese, they implore. Or more French. But despite this constant flow of advice, we have very little idea how to make kids happy.
