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You 2.0: Dream Jobs
Why do you work? Popular wisdom says your answer depends on what your job is. But psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale University finds it may have more to do with how we think about our work. Across a diverse array of jobs — from secretaries to custodians to computer programmers — Wrzesniewski finds people are about equally split in whether they say they have a "job," a "career," or a "calling." This week on Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam talks with Wrzesniewski about how we find meaning and purpose at work. This episode is part of our "You 2.0" summer series. Each story looks at how we can improve the decisions we make, from the mundane to the momentous.
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Can the Psychological Technique of ‘Pre-Conformity’ Help Change Our Harmful Behaviors?
Psychologists have found a simple trick to reduce meat consumption in restaurants. Tell a customer that other people are increasingly choosing the menu's meatless options, and the customer becomes more likely to order a vegetarian meal. It's a simple but effective intervention that relies on peer pressure and social influence to convince people to rethink their longstanding habits, says Gregg Sparkman, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Stanford University who led the experiment. Essentially, Sparkman's findings show that you can change a person's behavior by highlighting other people's success in changing their behaviors.
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There’s No Innocent Way to Ask Your Son or Daughter About Grandkids
This summer, my family has been spending a month at the beach. It’s been like a daydream come to life: bright days and languid evenings spent with family, including a sparkly 3-year-old and her serene new baby sister. My granddaughters. I started picturing—and pining for—this kind of family gathering, the three-generation kind that includes grandchildren, as my 60s loomed and my two daughters entered their 30s with no obvious plans for baby-making. I’d kept to a pretty brisk schedule when I became a mother; I had both of my girls before I turned 30.
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You 2.0: When Did Marriage Become So Hard?
Marriage is hard. In fact, there's evidence it's getting even harder. Eli Finkel, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, argues that's because our expectations of marriage have increased dramatically in recent decades. "[A] marriage that would have been acceptable to us in the 1950s is a disappointment to us today because of those high expectations," he says. The flip side of that disappointment, of course, is a marriage that's pretty amazing.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Linguistic Synchrony Predicts the Immediate and Lasting Impact of Text-Based Emotional Support Bruce P. Doré and Robert R. Morris Emotional support is critical to well-being, but the factors that influence the effectiveness of such support are not completely understood.
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Are first impressions really accurate?
Fictional stories are replete with villains and heroes with an almost magical ability to discern other people’s characters – think Hannibal Lecter or Sherlock Holmes. In real life, too, many people (including certain world leaders) seem to think they have this skill. Question-and-answer sites like Quora are filled with posts like: “I can read people’s personalities and emotions like a book. Is this normal? But do any of us really have an exceptional skill for judging other people’s personalities? Psychologists call such people – or the idea of them – “good judges”. And for more than a century, they have been trying to answer the question of whether these good judges really exist.
