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The Lives They Lived 2018
Walter Mischel: A psychologist of great discipline who sometimes couldn't wait before grabbing that second marshmallow. Picture a boy, 8 years old, assisting his parents in a strange and somber task. In their gracious home in Vienna, they are throwing family documents into the fireplace, trying to erase their Jewish identities in the flames. Hitler’s troops have just rolled through their streets to cheering crowds. Now the boy, about to throw another document into the fire, stops: This one has a gold seal and a photo affixed. The man in the photo, he learns when he shows it to his parents, is his maternal grandfather, who once lived in the United States.
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Implicit Attitudes Can Change Over the Long Term
Data collected from 2004 to 2016 show that Americans’ attitudes toward certain social groups are becoming less biased over time.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring the neural underpinnings of perceiving familiar faces and extremeness aversion as a heuristic.
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Here’s how to crack your New Year’s resolutions
Hope springs eternal. At least on New Year’s. On this first of January, the coming year is a blank slate. It’s a time when we can set our goals – to exercise more, to eat less, to perform our best – in the hopes of making 2019 a year that we can look back on with pride. There’s one problem, though: the success rate for New Year’s resolutions is pretty bleak. Less than 10% of resolutions have been kept by year’s end and 25% fail before 15 January. In a society as obsessed with success as ours – where bestsellers offering advice on how to be gritty, goal-directed, and disciplined line the shelves of almost every bookstore – this seems a rather odd situation.
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The Dry January Effect
Bottoms down: It’s Dry January. For Heather Molnar that means holding the gin in her gin and tonic for the rest of the month and substituting that end-of-day glass of wine with kombucha. “I like to put it in a wine glass or something fancy,” says Ms. Molnar, a 46-year-old content strategist who lives in Morris Plains, N.J. Ms. Molnar is doing her fourth consecutive Dry January, a popular challenge in which people become teetotalers for a month. The phenomenon is widely practiced and promoted in the U.K. through a public-health campaign started by the charity Alcohol Change UK in 2013. More than four million people have signed on in recent years, the charity says.
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The Science of Compassion
Plenty of people learn about ideas in psychology, but Kellie Gillespie, a writer based in London, did something unusual. She took what she had learned in the class, and applied it in her own life. "My life changed after doing Professor Plous' course," Kellie says. The course was in social psychology, taught by Scott Plous of Wesleyan University. Hundreds of thousands of other people enrolled in the same online course. Kellie and her virtual classmates were exposed to psychological concepts such as the norm of reciprocity: if you're nice to someone, or you open up to them, they're likely to do the same with you.
