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The Value of Your Future Self
The New York Times: I put on lipstick to meet my future self. I was nervous. When Mike Wehner of The Daily Dot tried to talk to his future self — that is, the one rendered by the communication company Orange’s new Future Self tool — he encountered a “disfigured monster.” Future Self takes a picture of your face, “ages” you by 20 years and then lets you chat with your 2034 self — but as Mr. Wehner learned, it’s susceptible to fooling. He writes: “I first noticed that the site’s facial recognition might be a bit wonky when it tried to capture a wrinkle on my shirt, thinking it was a human face.
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Depressed People Believe that Life Gets Better
Adults typically believe that life gets better — today is better than yesterday was and tomorrow will be even better than today. A new study shows that even depressed individuals believe in a brighter future, but this optimistic belief may not lead to better outcomes. The findings are published in Clinical Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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In Interrogations, Teenagers Are Too Young to Know Better
The New York Times: Even when police interrogators left the room, cameras kept recording the teenage suspects. Some paced. Several curled up and slept. One sobbed loudly, hitting his head against the wall, berating himself. Two boys, left alone together, discussed their offense, joking. What none did, however, was exercise his constitutional rights. It was not clear whether the youths even understood them. Therefore none had a lawyer at his side. None left, though all were free to do so, and none remained silent. Some 37 percent made full confessions, and 31 percent made incriminating statements. ...
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The Struggles of a Psychologist Studying Self-Control
The New Yorker: Walter Mischel had a terrible time quitting smoking. He had started young, and, even as his acumen and self-knowledge grew, he just couldn’t stop. His habit continued through his years as a graduate student, at Ohio State, and into the beginning of his teaching career, as a psychologist at Harvard and then at Stanford, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. “I was a three-packs-a-day smoker, supplemented by a pipe,” Mischel told me recently. “And, when the pipe ran out, it was supplemented by a cigar.” After the first Surgeon General’s report on the dangers of tobacco came out, in 1964, Mischel realized that his smoking could very well kill him.
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Planning to Do Good Tomorrow Gives Us Permission to Be Bad Today
Pacific Standard: A recent study provided still more evidence of the very human tendency to engage in “moral licensing.” It found people who reported doing a good deed in the morning—and thereby solidified their self-image as admirably virtuous—were more likely to engage in unethical behavior later that day. While this largely unconscious dynamic is hardly something to be proud of, newly published research suggests it is amazingly easy to set into motion.
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The world is actually becoming more peaceful — believe it or not
PRI: It’s time for a reality check. War seems more widespread than ever. Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan, etc. Pope Francis warned earlier this month that a "piecemeal" World War III may have already begun. Violence on the streets seems to be growing too. But stop the presses! It seems that may not actually be true. “Violence exists,” says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. “It hasn’t gone down to zero. But past decades were far more violent.” Pinker has crunched the numbers. He first published his findings in 2011 in a book called The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. He’s just updated his findings in the light of the violence in the three years since then.
