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Need to Dust Off Your Social Skills?
As we move through the spring of The Great Vaccination, many of us are feeling cautious optimism, and also its flip side: creeping dread. Maybe you have a sense of ambivalence about how to interact with others again. If you used to work in an office, you might be worried about returning to work — but eager to see people again. Or you find yourself having to confront a neighbor about a longstanding problem — but you’re out of practice with conflict resolution.
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You’re Gonna Miss Zoom When It’s Gone
If there’s a villain of the pandemic, other than COVID-19, it’s probably Zoom. The videochatting platform is making people tired, it’s making people awkward, and it’s making people sick of their own faces. Zoom is such a shoddy substitute for real life that, according to one survey, nearly one in five workers has illicitly met up in person with colleagues to discuss work. And in another poll, a third of women said they were “talked over, interrupted or ignored more frequently” in virtual meetings than in person. ...
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Why Adults Lose the ‘Beginner’s Mind’
Here’s a sobering thought: The older we get, the harder it is for us to learn, to question, to reimagine. This isn’t just habit hardening into dogma. It’s encoded into the way our brains change as we age. And it’s worsened by an intellectual and economic culture that prizes efficiency and dismisses play. Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where she runs the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab; she’s also the author of over 100 papers and half a dozen books, including “The Gardener and the Carpenter” and “The Philosophical Baby.” What I love about her work is she takes the minds of children seriously.
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The False Promise of Quick-Fix Psychology
It would be hard to find a scientific field that has enjoyed as much mainstream success in the 21st century as social psychology. Social psychologists dominate the TED Talk stage, rack up impressive contracts as consultants to schools and companies, and write book after bestselling book. Their most viral ideas promise to solve some of society’s most pressing problems, often in slickly counterintuitive ways. Amy Cuddy (61 million TED Talk views) argued that by adopting brief, expansive poses—think Wonder Woman with her hands on her hips—women could feel more powerful in the workplace, shrinking stubbornly persistent gender gaps.
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The U.S. Is Opening Up. For the Anxious, That Comes With a Cost.
When the pandemic narrowed the world, Jonathan Hirshon stopped traveling, eating out, going to cocktail parties and commuting to the office. What a relief. Mr. Hirshon suffers from severe social anxiety. In the past, casual get-togethers and meetings came with a rapid heartbeat and clenched fists. He preferred to interact virtually, and welcomed the Zoom meetings that others merely tolerated. Even as he grieved the pandemic’s toll, he found lockdown life to be a respite. “There is cognitive dissonance to feeling good in the middle of the pandemic,” he said. Now with normalcy about to return, Mr.
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Your Pandemic Baby’s Coming Out Party
... Even grandparents, aunts or uncles in the same country as babies born during Covid-19 have been kept away by travel restrictions and other precautions. Darby Saxbe, an associate professor at the University of Southern California, said her lab started following 760 expectant parents in the spring of 2020 to study their mental health, social connection and other factors. In open-ended survey responses, many participants reported that they hadn’t been able to see extended family. The first pandemic babies are becoming toddlers this spring, which means entire infancies have passed while children and their parents were isolated from their loved ones.
