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What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages
The New York Times: Parents and policy makers have become obsessed with getting young children to learn more, faster. But the picture of early learning that drives them is exactly the opposite of the one that emerges from developmental science. In the last 30 years, the United States has completed its transformation to an information economy. Knowledge is as important in the 21st century as capital was in the 19th, or land in the 18th. In the same 30 years, scientists have discovered that even very young children learn more than we once thought possible. Put those together and our preoccupation with making children learn is no surprise. ...
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Effect of Relative Encoding on Memory-Based Judgments Marissa A. Sharif and Daniel M. Oppenheimer Some theories of decision making suggest that when people encode a stimulus, they represent where the stimulus lies in a distribution rather than the absolute value of the stimulus. How does this tendency to represent information as relative rather than absolute influence decision making? In several studies, participants -- at two timepoints -- evaluated sound clips, the speed of toy cars, or the number of butterflies landing on flowers.
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Does Hot Weather Fuel Road Rage?
Hot weather seems to amplify people’s responses to provocation, ultimately increasing rates of aggressive behavior and violence.
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The Nerve to Believe in Our Kids
The Huffington Post: Last night my teenage daughter and I watched a thriller called Nerve, a new movie starring Emma Roberts and Dave Franco. Nerve portrays a world where young people chase after instafame by completing dares while a virtual audience watches. It also explores themes such as loss of privacy on social media and with games like Pokemon Go, and it shows how the online crowd veiled in anonymity can bring out bile, hate and shame. ... The movie eerily echoed the implications of research that my colleague Patricia Greenfield and I conducted at UCLA; these studies indicated that fame obsession had become part of the sociocultural environment of adolescents.
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WHAT MAKES PEOPLE FEEL UPBEAT AT WORK
The New Yorker: Creating a positive work environment sounds like a noble aspiration for both businesses and the people who work for them. No one ever says that they want to work in a negative environment, after all, or even in a blasé one. And yet, in late April, the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling against T-Mobile for that very aspiration: the telecommunications company had run afoul of the law by including a provision in its employee handbook requiring workers “to maintain a positive work environment in a manner that is conducive to effective working relationships.” ... “It sounds really nice.
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Paying With Cash Hurts. That’s Also Why It Feels So Good.
The New York Times: Paying with cash is painful — and that’s a good thing, according to new research. When people pay for items using cold, hard cash rather than by card or online, they feel more of a sting and therefore assign more value to the purchase, according to Avni M. Shah, an assistant marketing professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her findings were born of personal experience: One day she forgot her debit card, so she paid for a latte with physical dollars — and felt her drink tasted better that day. Could her method of payment have been the reason? ...
