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How Dishonesty Drains You
Have you ever told a friend a made-up story to entertain that person or spare his or her feelings? Do you know anyone who confessed to you he or she overreported the number of hours worked to pad a paycheck? Some may think of these “white lies,” or small instances of dishonest behavior, as relatively harmless, a slight ethical lapse, when compared with full-scale corporate fraud. We may consider a white lie to be especially harmless if it is in service of protecting an important relationship. Researchers have studied the potential financial and legal consequences of such small instances of dishonesty as padding expense reports and pilfering pens.
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New UCLA institute will study — and spread — kindness
A friendly smile. A food pantry donation. Or, a remarkable act of Los Angeles benevolence — allowing a driver to cut in front of you. Such acts of kindness have a self-serving upside, too, as science has conclusively shown they also make you healthier. Now UCLA is poised to advance that science with the Wednesday launch of the world’s first interdisciplinary research institute on kindness, which will explore, for instance, how and why being nice to others reduces depression and the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease.
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Networking May Not Pay Off for Everyone
Professionals who invest time in networking against their personal preferences may find that their work suffers as a result, a study suggests.
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Under Time Pressure, People Tell Us What We Want to Hear
When asked to answer questions quickly and impulsively, people tend to respond with a socially desirable answer rather than an honest one, a set of experiments shows.
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New Research from Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring peripersonal space and visual search and memory.
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New Evidence Reveals Training Can Reduce Cognitive Bias And Improve Decision-making
Ever since Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky formalized the concept of cognitive bias in 1972, most empirical evidence has given credence to the claim that our brain is incapable of improving our decision-making abilities. Scientists regularly remind us of the many ways cognitive biases interfere with the choices we make. There have been over 50 Forbes articles linked to this scientific research focus in the past year alone. ... However, our latest field study, published by Psychological Science in September 2019, suggests that one-shot de-biasing training can significantly reduce the deleterious influence of cognitive bias on decision making.
