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Popular People Live Longer
The New York Times: I often hear from teenagers that one of their greatest goals is to obtain more Instagram followers than anyone they know. Even some adults appear obsessed with social media, tracking the number of retweets on their Twitter profiles or likes on Facebook. This type of status-seeking might be easily dismissed as juvenile or superficial, but there’s more to it. Recent evidence suggests that being unpopular can be hazardous to our health. In fact, it might even kill us. Yet most don’t realize that there’s more than one type of popularity, and social media may not supply the one that makes us feel good.
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IMAGINATION CAN RESTRAIN IMPULSIVENESS
Pacific Standard: As Washington watchers are well aware, bad decisions are often the product of impulsiveness. Whether it's our choice of what to eat for lunch or our nation's policy on climate change, we too often make choices that produce immediate gratification, but ultimately produce harm. Psychological research suggests this is, to some degree, innate. Experiments have shown that small kids who can't resist reaching for a marshmallow have less successful adult lives, due to that inability to resist temptation in favor of pursing long-term goals. But according to a new study, there may be a simple way to focus our minds on the bigger picture.
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Death becomes you
The Boston Globe: An analysis of the blog postings of terminally ill people and the last words of Texas death-row inmates revealed that they were more positive and less negative than what the general public wrote when asked to imagine themselves in the same positions. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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The things dying people care about reveal a lot about how to live
Quartz: Ask people to imagine what they’d say if they knew they were dying and most would have words of sadness, fear, and regret. But new psychological research bolsters what chaplains, hospice workers, and others who spend a lot of time in the company of those approaching the end of life have long known: the process of dying is a complicated one, with room for moments of profundity and light alongside fear and darkness. In a series of experiments documented in the journal Psychological Science, researchers compared the blog posts of terminally ill people and the last words of death row inmates to the words of healthy people asked to imagine themselves writing near their death.
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Police Are Less Respectful Toward Black Drivers, Report Finds
The New York Times: Police officers are significantly less respectful and consistently ruder toward black motorists during routine traffic stops than they are toward white drivers, a paper released this week found. The paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detailed the ways in which footage from body cameras worn by members of the Oakland Police Department in California helped illuminate the disparity in treatment. The report was written by group of researchers in the psychology, linguistics and computer science departments at Stanford University, including Jennifer Eberhardt, a psychology professor.
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Artificial intelligence can now predict suicide with remarkable accuracy
Quartz: When someone commits suicide, their family and friends can be left with the heartbreaking and answerless question of what they could have done differently. Colin Walsh, data scientist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, hopes his work in predicting suicide risk will give people the opportunity to ask “what can I do?” while there’s still a chance to intervene. Walsh and his colleagues have created machine-learning algorithms that predict, with unnerving accuracy, the likelihood that a patient will attempt suicide.
