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Humans have innate grasp of probability
Nature: People overrate the chances of dying in a plane crash and guess incorrectly at the odds that a coin toss will yield 'heads' after a string of several 'tails'. Yet humans have an innate sense of chance, a study of indigenous Maya people suggests. Adults in Guatemala who have never learned a formal number system or a written language did as well as formally educated adults and children at estimating the probability of chance events1, the researchers found. Children are born with a sense of number, and the roots of our mathematical abilities seem to exist in monkeys, chickens and even salamanders.
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When It Comes to Making Choices, Ignorance Really Can Be Bliss
New York Magazine: There is an established notion of the "happy idiot" — someone who doesn’t know a lot, knows he doesn’t know a lot, and doesn’t care. Think about Joey Tribbiani from Friends or Fry from Futurama. Though simple-minded and rather oblivious to their surroundings, both characters tended to come out on top. New research suggests that there may be something to this frequently invoked trope. Not knowing a lot — and being aware of your own ignorance — can make decisions easier and, as a result, lead to greater happiness. Decisions are a big part of life in the 21st century. Never before have we had to make so many of them.
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Great Vacation? Don’t Brag to Your Friends
The New York Times: Your friends don’t want to hear about your excellent adventures. While you may have gotten great pleasure from an epic event — sipping a rare wine in Burgundy, watching a Himalayan sunrise — that pleasure is all your own. A recent study in Psychological Science says that despite the thrills people receive from an extraordinary experience, few anticipate its potential social cost: exclusion by friends who would really rather not hear about it. Harvard researchers found that when people socialize, those who had the same experience, no matter how mundane, enjoyed chatting about it together.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Morality of Larks and Owls: Unethical Behavior Depends on Chronotype as Well as Time of Day Brian C. Gunia, Christopher M. Barnes, and Sunita Sah In 2014, Kouchaki and Smith published an article suggesting that people are more moral in the morning than they are in the afternoon. In this commentary, Gunia and colleagues examined whether differences in the patterns of people's circadian rhythms (i.e., chronotype) influence this phenomenon. Participants categorized as morning or evening people performed a task in either the morning or the evening in which they had the opportunity to cheat.
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A Leader’s Stress at Home Can Become Contagious in the Office
It makes sense that a family argument at the breakfast table could sour someone’s mood in the office, impacting their performance at work. But new research suggests that, for supervisors, experiences at home don’t just spill over to their lives at work, they can actually become “contagious” throughout the rest of the office. The study, from psychological scientists Lieke L. ten Brummelhuis, Jarrod M. Haar, and Maree Roche, found that leaders’ emotions about home life – whether positive or negative – can trickle down to their subordinates in the office.
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You're Growing Older … Is Your Life Getting Better Or Worse?
NPR: Robert F. Kennedy once said that GDP, or gross domestic product, "measures everything ... except that which makes life worthwhile." GDP, in case you weren't paying attention in Econ 101, looks at economic activity as a way to size up how a country is doing. RFK has a point. The status of a country amounts to more than the number of goods it produces and sells. Psychology professor Arthur Stone says, "Right now, there's a lot of dissatisfaction in using GDP as a measure of a country's progress." So then what do you use? For several years now, scientists have been grappling with this question.
