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Why Intentionally Building Empathy Is More Important Now Than Ever
Many people believe that life is a zero-sum game and that the most ruthless people get the furthest. But Jamil Zaki, a Stanford psychologist and author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, says there's a lot of evidence to the contrary. “It turns out that nice guys finish first in lots of different ways,” Zaki said on KQED’s Forum program. And, when people are nice, they not only help others, but they help themselves as well. Empathetic people are generally happier, healthier and more effective at work. And, acting from a place of empathy, he argues, could be just what the world needs at this moment, when division has become the norm.
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Babies understand a fundamental aspect of counting long before they can say numbers out loud, according to researchers
When she was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Jinjing Jenny Wang kept wondering: How do children learn to count? It’s so basic, “but when you think about the problem, it is really difficult,” she said. “There is no number in this world we can see and touch. There’s no ‘three-ness’ in the world that is perceivable.” Linguists, philosophers and scientists have puzzled over this, Wang said. She knew decades of research had established that children typically don’t fully understand numbers until they are preschoolers, but she wondered what they knew before then. “How do they know these words are associated with numbers — or quantities in the world?” she asked.
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Why You Should Find Time to Be Alone With Yourself
Being lonely hurts — it can even negatively impact your health. But the mere act of being alone with oneself doesn’t have to be bad, and experts say it can even benefit your social relationships, improve your creativity and confidence, and help you regulate your emotions so that you can better deal with adverse situations. “It’s not that solitude is always good, but it can be good” if you’re open to rejecting the idea — common in the west — that time by yourself is always a negative experience you’re being forced into, according to Thuy-vy Nguyen, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Durham University, who studies solitude. ...
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Juvenile Justice – Moving From Punishment to Hope and Healing
Every year in the United States, nearly 250,000 youths are tried, sentenced, or incarcerated as adults. Though the age limit for juvenile court varies from state to state, the cutoff age in most jurisdictions is 18. Frankie Guzman, a lawyer at the National Center for Youth Law who directs its California Youth Justice Initiative and who was incarcerated himself as a youth, calls this cutoff “arbitrary,” because the adolescent brain continues to develop well into one’s 20s.
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Opinion: Why you find it so hard to resist taking bad advice
In a series of experiments, my colleagues and I had a middle-aged man offer 253 ferry passengers traveling from Connecticut to Long Island the choice between $5 and a chance in a mystery lottery (paying from $0 to $10 with an average payout of less than $5) in exchange for completing a short survey. When he gave no advice, only 8% of survey-takers chose the lottery. When he advised passengers to choose the lottery, 20% did. More alarming were the results when he disclosed that, if they chose the lottery, he would receive a bonus: As logic suggests, the passengers told us they trusted him less now they knew about his conflict of interest. Yet, 42% of them complied and took the lottery.
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The Ultimate Learning Machines
Last July, I went to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the blue-sky government research lab that helped to invent the computer and the internet. I was there, strange as it may seem, to talk about babies. The latest big DARPA research project, Machine Common Sense, is funding collaborations between child psychologists like me and computer scientists. This year I also talked about children’s minds at Google, Facebook and Apple. Why are quintessentially geeky places like DARPA and Google suddenly interested in talking about something as profoundly ungeeky as babies?
