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The Limits Of Nudging: Why Can’t California Get People to Take Free Money?
The Earned Income Tax Credit supplements incomes through the tax code, awarding thousands of dollars each year primarily to low-wage workers with kids. But there's a problem: a huge population of eligible workers fails to file their taxes and get the money each year. ... In 2018, the state of California and the California Policy Lab, an interdisciplinary think tank of scholars from various University of California schools, started trying to solve this problem, and they commissioned one of the most fascinating experiments in "nudging" we've seen in a while. ... Nudges are simple, low-cost interventions aimed at gently guiding people to make better decisions.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on delay of gratification in children, the link between religiosity and violent crime, self-objectification and women’s social activism, and how object design can afford learning.
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What Do Wolfdogs Want?
The animals are a human creation. They belong neither in homes nor in the wild. ... Shadow is a wolfdog—a wolf-dog hybrid. That makes her an exotic animal in the eyes of Tooele’s law enforcement, ineligible for residence in a family home. Many states ban wolfdogs, as do many municipalities, since they require more resources and pose more danger than your average pup. “It is like having a toddler for a decade,” said Steve Wastell of Apex Protection Project, a wolfdog-rescue group based in Southern California. A toddler with jaws strong enough to shatter a moose femur. Still, like sugar gliders and pythons, wolfdogs have an enduring, cultish following among pet owners.
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The Secret to Dealing With Cynics at Work
In a management training that my company sent me to a few years back, I was introduced to a new concept: “cynical terrorists.” This category was meant to describe the kind of person who assumes the worst of everyone, shoots down every new idea, and generally drenches their environment in negativity with the volatile energy of a broken sprinkler system. Cynical terrorists, our coach explained, are highly engaged at their workplace, but in a destructive way. This makes them very powerful and very scary. I picture the Joker in a J. Crew button-down shirt, sowing chaos for the hell of it. ...
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The Outsize Influence of Your Middle-School Friends
No wonder, then, that researchers studying a phenomenon known as social buffering found some puzzling results when they studied teenagers. Social buffering is a way of describing the protective, positive effect of one individual on another. It describes the power of one person to reduce another’s stress. ... But how does that response change as kids grow older? That’s what the neuroscientist Dylan Gee, now at Yale University, wanted to know. She studies how brain circuits mature, and has found that puberty is a turning point for dealing with stress.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on moral concerns and emotional responses, how children use probability to infer happiness, and implicit gender bias in descriptions of expected elections results.
