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The Psychology of the Breathtakingly Stupid Mistake
Scientific American: We all make stupid mistakes from time to time. History is replete with examples. Legend has it that the Trojans accepted the Greek’s “gift” of a huge wooden horse, which turned out to be hollow and filled with a crack team of Greek commandos. The Tower of Pisa started to lean even before construction was finished—and is not even the world’s farthest leaning tower. NASA taped over the original recordings of the moon landing, and operatives for Richard Nixon’s re-election committee were caught breaking into a Watergate office, setting in motion the greatest political scandal in U.S. history.
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How Psychology Explains the Tamir Rice Shooting
The Atlantic's CityLab: On a Sunday in November 2014, a Cleveland man dialed 911 to report that a young black boy—“probably a juvenile”—was brandishing a gun around in the park near him. “It’s probably fake, but it’s scaring the shit out of me,” the caller said on the phone. The officer who responded fatally shot the subject of the 911 call within seconds of arriving. The boy, it turned out, was 11-year-old; and his gun was just a toy. ... In other words, Loehmann (just like the man who called 911) perceived an 11-year old black boy with a toy gun as an existential threat. Why?
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Can Money Buy You Happiness?
NPR: Social scientist Michael Norton researches how money can buy happiness — when you don't spend it on yourself. The key is social spending that benefits not just you, but other people. Michael Norton is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Prior to joining HBS, Professor Norton was a Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and MIT's Sloan School of Management. Read the whole story: NPR
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A Road Trip to the Origins of Our Species
The New York Times: It was on an all-night Capitol Air flight to Brussels, sitting in the back smoking rows with Leon Festinger, playing endless backgammon and consuming Scotch at an alarming rate, that I realized that, whether I liked it or not, I was about to learn a lot about human origins and uniqueness. The year was 1981. Leon, the ingenious and intellectually adventurous social psychologist responsible for the theory of cognitive dissonance, had once again switched fields, this time from visual perception into what amounted to archaeology, and I was his sidekick. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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When Backup Plans Backfire
Backup plans can change the way that a person pursues a goal, as well as the likelihood of achieving it, even if the backup plans are never even used.
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The Supremely Old, Supremely Sharp, Supreme Court
The Atlantic: Justice Antonin Scalia, more than any other Supreme Court justice, set the parameters for the constitutional debates of this era. The sharpness of his mind and the rigor of his jurisprudence were regularly on display up until his passing. As those of us fortunate enough to have directly engaged with him in recent years can attest, up until his last breath, there was no indication that he had dulled in his ability to navigate the incredible intellectual challenges that were his job description. ... But what does the inevitable deterioration of fluid intelligence mean in terms of the ability to work into the golden years? The answer, unsatisfyingly, defies easy generalization.
