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You’re Not as Smart as You Think: Perils and Benefits of Overconfidence
It is widely known—or at least widely believed—that people are overconfident in their own abilities. Psychological research has consistently found, in fact, that people have too high a self-assessment when it comes to traits that they see as important or socially desirable. We tend to think we are funnier, better leaders, better at driving and even more attractive than we really are. But what do people think about one of the most desirable and important traits a person can have: intelligence? The claim that “most people think they are smarter than average” is a cliché of popular psychology, but the scientific evidence for it is surprisingly thin.
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NIH delays controversial clinical trials policy for some studies
Basic brain and behavioral researchers will get more than a year to comply with a new U.S. policy that will treat many of their studies as clinical trials. The announcement from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) appears to defuse, for now, a yearlong controversy over whether basic research on humans should follow the same rules as studies testing drugs. --- Behavioral researchers conducting studies that meet the clinical trials definition will also have to take a training course on clinical practices, but it can be a brief online seminar tailored to the field.
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Your Earliest Memory Probably Never Happened
What is your first memory? A vivid scene may come to mind, seen from toddler eyes. Unfortunately, that scene may be a work of fiction, a new study finds. That's because scientific literature suggests that it's not possible to have a memory from before the age of 2, said lead study author Shazia Akhtar, a senior research associate at the University of Bradford in England. Despite this, nearly 40 percent of the people in the new study claimed that their first memory occurred at age 2 years or younger, with most of the first memories falling between ages 9 months to 12 months.
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New Research about Eating, Sleeping, Eliminating and Snuggling
As Cleveland Cavaliers guard J. R. Smith has probably heard a few times at this point, you have to be solid in the fundamentals. For a basketball player, some of the fundamentals are dribbling, shooting and, as Smith learned the hard way, knowing the correct score with seconds to play in the first game of the NBA Finals. For the rest of us (who blissfully do dumb things without attracting worldwide attention), the major fundamentals include sleeping, eating, sex and eliminating. Fortunately, new scientific research has made key discoveries all these areas.
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You Should Actually Send That Thank You Note You’ve Been Meaning to Write
We want to let you know that we are grateful that you are taking the time to click on this headline. Because without you reading the story, what’s the point? We are now going to use your precious time to share a surprising new finding: People like getting thank you notes. --- The study, published last month in the journal Psychological Science, is an effort to fill a hole in the growing field of gratitude research. Numerous studies had documented a range of benefits to individuals who express gratitude, so then the question researchers turned to was — what’s holding people back?
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An Enormous Study of the Genes Related to Staying in School
When scientists publish their research, it’s rare for them to write an accompanying FAQ that explains what they found and what it means. It’s especially rare for that FAQ to be three times longer than the research paper itself. But Daniel Benjamin and his colleagues felt the need to do so, because they work on a topic that is frequently and easily misunderstood: the genetics of education. Over the past five years, Benjamin has been part of an international team of researchers identifying variations in the human genome that are associated with how many years of education people get. In 2013, after analyzing the DNA of 101,000 people, the team found just three of these genetic variants.
