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The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things
Fast Company's Co. Exist Most people are in the pursuit of happiness. There are economists who think happiness is the best indicator of the health of a society. We know that money can make you happier, though after your basic needs are met, it doesn't make you that much happier. But one of the biggest questions is how to allocate our money, which is (for most of us) a limited resource. There's a very logical assumption that most people make when spending their money: that because a physical object will last longer, it will make us happier for a longer time than a one-off experience like a concert or vacation. According to recent research, it turns out that assumption is completely wrong.
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No Easy, Reliable Way To Screen For Suicide
NPR: Even a careful psychiatric examination of the co-pilot involved in last week's Germanwings jetliner crash probably would not have revealed whether he intended to kill himself, researchers say. "As a field, we're not very good at accurately predicting who is at risk for suicidal behavior," says Matthew Nock, a psychology professor at Harvard. He says studies show that mental health professionals "perform no better than chance" when it comes to predicting which patients will attempt suicide. Read the whole story: NPR
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Happiness Gap May Favor Liberals
The New York Times: Conservatives are happier than liberals, or so decades of surveys that ask about life satisfaction would suggest. The existence of a so-called ideological happiness gap is so well established that recently social scientists have mostly tried to explain it. But a new series of studies questions the gap itself, raising the possibility that although conservatives may report greater happiness than liberals, they are no more likely to act in ways that indicate that they really are happier.
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Old (Commuting) Habits Die Hard
Convincing people to switch from driving their car to taking the bus to work isn’t easy. But when the environmental charity group WWF announced that it would be moving its United Kingdom headquarters to another town, psychological scientists Ian Walker, Gregory O. Thomas, and Bas Verplanken of the University of Bath saw a golden opportunity for studying the influence of habit on commuting behavior. Commuting the same way day after day, people don’t typically weigh the particular pros and cons of different modes of transit. Rather, people tend to carefully weigh their options when they first start using a particular route.
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Bridging the Conversation Gap
The Clinton Foundation sponsors an initiative called Too Small to Fail, which aims to help low-income parents better prepare their children for school. Many children who grow up in poverty enter school already far behind, and this achievement gap often persists into adulthood. Much of this achievement gap can be traced back to poor language skills, including stunted vocabulary development—the so-called “word gap.” It’s estimated that poor children, by the time they hit kindergarten, have heard 30 million fewer words than their more fortunate classmates.
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Inside the psychology of productivity
Chicago Tribune: You wake up with it in the morning and go to bed thinking about it at night: an ever-crushing load of emails, meetings, conference calls, and tasks that needed to get done yesterday. Family time means reading sales reports in the room where your kids are playing video games. For entrepreneurs, there's soooo much to get done — 85 percent of fast-growth-company CEOs work 10 or more hours a day, according to a recent survey of the Inc. 500. Under such circumstances, personal productivity isn't just a metric. It's also a mandate. ...