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The Perils of Empathy
The Wall Street Journal: Everywhere you turn in American politics, leaders talk about the need for empathy. The best-known instance, of course, comes from Bill Clinton, who told an AIDS activist in 1992, “I feel your pain.” But it’s also been a recurrent theme in the career of Barack Obama, who declared in 2007 (while still a senator) that “the biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit.” ...
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One Way to Win at Negotiations: Crack a Dumb Joke
New York Magazine: Here’s a move that pulls double duty: Next time you’re seated across from a potential new employer to hammer out salary details, try kicking things off with a silly wisecrack. One, it’ll break the ice; and two, it might just help you leave with a better offer. As the Association for Psychological Science explained in a recent blog post, past research has shown that opening with a joke about your desired salary can be a better strategy than playing it straight. ...
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Let’s All Stop Babbling About ‘Talent’
Thrive Global: Katie Ledecky has been described as “an immense talent” but her own coach, Bruce Gemmell, has pointed out that Katie is “not a gifted athlete.” Whether the talent of Michael Phelps is a consequence of his genetically determined anatomy is a topic of perennial debate. And Usain Bolt recently referred to his “God-given talent” in the same interview in which he pointed out that “in Jamaica, we know we have to work hard. We do not get anything unless we work for it. My success is just a continuation of the great traditions left behind by past athletes.” Talent. What are we to make of this word that people define in such different ways?
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You’ve probably been tricked by fake news and don’t know it
ScienceNews: If you spent Thanksgiving trying in vain to convince relatives that the Pope didn’t really endorse Donald Trump or that Hillary Clinton didn’t sell weapons to ISIS, fake news has already weaseled its way into your brain. Those “stories” and other falsified news outperformed much of the real news on Facebook before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And on Twitter, an analysis by University of Southern California computer scientists found that nearly 20 percent of election-related tweets came from bots, computer programs posing as real people and often spouting biased or fake news. ...
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Illusion Reveals that the Brain Fills in Peripheral Vision
What we see in the periphery, just outside the direct focus of the eye, may sometimes be a visual illusion, research shows. Visit Page
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The Psychological Key To Beating A Challenge
Forbes: In a famous study first conducted in 1960, psychologist Walter Mischel put 4 to 6-year-old children alone in a room with a marshmallow. Before he left the room, he’d tell them they could eat it now; or, if they waited a few minutes until he came back, they’d get two. The kids usually devoured the marshmallow immediately. Sometimes, however, Mischel told the children that one way to resist the marshmallow now and get two later is by pretending the marshmallow wasn’t there. By changing how he prepared them for the challenge, he dramatically changed their behavior: children could now wait 15 minutes without eating the marshmallow. Read the whole story: Forbes
