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Should We Pay Children for Good Behavior?
Hi, Dan. I’m raising two teenagers and have discovered just how hard it is to teach them to be polite, to clean up after themselves and to leave the house on time. Would it make sense for me to pay them for better behavior? —Billy Simple rewards may seem like a good idea, but they often have unintended consequences. Consider the case of Kelly the dolphin, who lived in a marine institute in Mississippi. To teach her to keep her pool clean, her trainers started trading her fish for any litter she collected. Kelly soon learned that litter of any size would win her a treat.
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The Real Reason You Procrastinate
This article would have been much better if I hadn’t waited until the last minute to write it. But then I wouldn’t have been able to claim that I did what so many procrastinators do regularly: I delayed work on a task to give myself an excuse if I happened to make a complete mess of it. It’s not that I’m lousy at my job, I could plausibly say. It’s just that I had so many other things to do at work and at home that I couldn’t give it my best effort. These sorts of self-serving excuses are so common that psychologists have coined a name for the practice. They call it self-handicapping. Think of self-handicapping as a strategy of intentionally sabotaging your own efforts.
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Conversing Could Be Key to Kids’ Brain Development
More than 20 years ago, psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley discovered what they called the "30 million word gap." Through family visits, they estimated that children under 4 from lower-income families heard a staggering 30 million fewer words than children from higher-income families. That study was embraced by Hillary Clinton and it spurred a White House conference on the topic, public service announcement campaigns and the creation of at least two outreach organizations. The clear message: Talk to your babies a lot.
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Childhood Friendships May Have Some Health Benefits in Adulthood
Time spent with friends in childhood is associated with physical health in adulthood, according to data from a multi-decade study of men.
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Fine-Tune Your B.S. Detector: You’ll Need It
Do you have a good B.S. detector? You need one in our digital age. The skill of spotting false information—rubbish, nonsense and, yes, fake news—is so important these days that scientists have begun serious research on it. They’re attempting to quantify when and why people spread it, who is susceptible to it, and how people can confront it. This month in Atlanta, at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, a group of psychologists and other scientists presented a symposium on their research. The title? “Bullshitting: Empirical and Experiential Examinations of a Pervasive Social Behavior.” B.S.
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What’s the Best Way to Inspire Positive Environmental Behavior?
Type "climate change" into any search engine and the results aren't difficult to predict: you'll probably see a woeful polar bear on a shrinking patch of ice. Either that or cracked, parched earth. But a new paper published in Global Environmental Change questions the power of nature to motivate climate action. "Frequently, visual and verbal stimuli used in the media to describe threats of climate change feature plants, animals, and other typical nature depictions," said Sabrina Helm, associate professor of retailing and consumer science at the University of Arizona and lead author of the paper.
