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Meglio investire in esperienze che in beni di consumo (Better to invest in experiences than consumer goods)
La Stampa: E’ molto più conveniente spendere i nostri soldi in qualcosa bello da ricordare, piuttosto che in acquisti di beni concreti; questo ci farà di sicuro più felici. Da una decina d’anni una corrente di psicologi sta cercando di dimostrare che vivere un’esperienza provoca maggiore benessere alla nostra mente del possesso di oggetti. Sembrerebbe quasi una corrente mistica della psicologia quella che vorrebbe convincerci ad abbracciare pratiche di vita che sembrano affini a esercizi spirituali, il concetto è che investire in bei ricordi ci appaghi assai più di una lussuriosa orgia di shopping compulsivo.
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Study Suggests ‘Extraordinary Experiences’ Might Make You Feel Bad
The Huffington Post: Many people seek out extraordinary experiences throughout their lifetimes. If they didn't, recreational activities like skydiving, bungee jumping, zorbing and mountain climbing wouldn't exist. However, a new study published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that people who experience extraordinary events are likely to feel less happy than people who experience normal, everyday occurrences. The reasoning is that people who experience extraordinary things have less in common with their peers than people who experience the norm.
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Memory Research Offers Clues to Preventing Human Error
An experiment shows that a specific type of memory aid can lower error rates in air traffic control.
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Everyone Agrees: CEOs Should Be Paid Less
Pacific Standard: The longest lasting impact of the Occupy movement might just be the conflict between the “99 Percent” and the “One Percent”—the term that has come to symbolize the vast wealth inequality that exists in this country. As it turned out, the one percent is something of a misnomer. The top 0.01 percent of Americans actually control the majority of wealth, and that very top slice is growing wealthier faster than anyone else in the economy The discrepancy between the one percent and 0.01 percent highlights both the negative branding of the idea of the one percent and the fact that our perceptions of inequality often don’t line up with reality.
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When You Shouldn’t Bring a Friend
The New York Times: Misery may love company, but new research suggests a corollary to that adage: Sometimes, having company could make misery even worse. For a paper published in the journal Psychological Science, Erica J. Boothby and her co-authors asked 23 female undergraduates to taste chocolate (“pretested to be pleasant tasting”) in the company of another person who was secretly working with the study authors. That person tasted one piece of chocolate along with them, and looked at a book of paintings while the participant tasted another piece. The undercover researcher didn’t talk to the participants about either task. Afterward, the participants rated both pieces of chocolate.
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Actually, People Still Like to Think
The New Yorker: This past July, Science published a paper with an alarming conclusion: most people would rather give themselves an electric shock than be alone with their thoughts. A slew of news stories followed, seizing on this dramatic evidence of our inability to be content without external distractions. “I was surprised that people find themselves such bad company,” Jonathan Schooler, a University of California, Santa Barbara, psychologist, who was not involved in the study, told the Boston Globe. The University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson and his collaborators began the study with a simple question: When our minds turn inward, “is it a pleasing experience”?