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Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others
Scientific American: People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea. Read the whole story: Scientific American
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You’re Too Busy. You Need a ‘Shultz Hour.’
The New York Times: The science of the mind is clear about this point. Our brains can be in either “task-positive” or “task-negative” mode, but not both at once. Our brain benefits from spending time in each state. Task-positive mode allows us to accomplish something in the moment. Task-negative mode is more colloquially known as daydreaming, and, as of McGill University has written, it “is responsible for our moments of greatest creativity and insight, when we’re able to solve problems that previously seemed unsolvable.” Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Love Culture: What It Takes to Create a Happy Workplace
Knowledge@Wharton: Knowledge@Wharton: Your study focused on an interesting environment, which was firehouses and firemen. Why did you pick firemen? What you were looking at, and what you were trying to find? Nancy Rothbard: Mandy and I really wanted to go in and understand how the emotional culture of an organization could affect how people both interact in the workplace, but also what the effects on them physiologically might be.
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Can a Difficult Childhood Enhance Cognition?
The Atlantic: Hard childhoods seem to not only rob children of material joys, but also of brain power. Children who grow up poor tend to score worse on tests of memory, processing speed, language, and attention. And they are 40 percent more likely to have a learning disability than their better-off peers. Busier and less-educated parents utter millions fewer words to their babies, creating a gap in verbal ability by the time the children are 3. Factors like hunger, unsafe housing, and parental instability all contribute to “toxic stress” that impairs brain development.
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How Your Phone Can Keep You From Spending
The Wall Street Journal: An app can help you order a pizza, find a parking spot—or plan your retirement. In more than a dozen recent experiments, Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely used mobile apps and simple tenets of psychology to help people save more money, pay down more debt and devise and stick to budgets. Overall, Dr. Ariely’s research at the university’s Common Cents Lab shows that people enrolled in the behavioral interventions spent less and saved more than those who weren’t. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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How Companies Can Benefit More From Their Corporate Giving
The Wall Street Journal: The past decade has seen an enormous increase in the number of companies engaged in charitable-giving initiatives, both with their customers and their employees. Many major brands now offer some form of charitable tie-in (“10% of profits go to charity”; “buy one and one goes to charity”), and many companies offer matching programs for employee donations. On their face, both types of initiatives feel good: Companies are showing they care. But the underlying psychology is more complex.
