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Groups of People Spot Lies More Often Than Individuals Do
Scientific American: A shifty gaze, fidgety stance or sweaty palms signal a liar in classic film noirs. In real life, however, it is surprisingly difficult to recognize when someone is telling a tall tale. Even among trained professionals, the lie-detection accuracy rate is only slightly better than pure chance. And courts tend to reject polygraph evidence because the tests lack standardized questions for determining falsehoods. For better odds, discussions of questionable claims appear to be the way to go. Psychologists at the University of Chicago have found that groups of people are consistently more reliable at rooting out fabrications than chance or individual judges.
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The ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ of stereotyping Asian American students
The Washington Post: “Ophelia” was never a very good student. The second generation Vietnamese American described herself as “not very intelligent,” someone who got straight Cs. She failed the exam to qualify for Advanced Placement classes at the end of Junior High. But for reasons beyond her understanding, she was placed on the AP track when she got to high school. There, surrounded by ambitious peers and high expectations, “something clicked,” she told researcher Jennifer Lee.
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Rethinking Work
The New York Times: HOW satisfied are we with our jobs? Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be. Why? One possibility is that it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view of Adam Smith, the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay.
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Want to Excel at Work? Take a Vacation
A comprehensive review finds that regular vacations are essential for keeping employees performing at their best. Visit Page
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[Retracted] Feeling Blue and Seeing Blue: Sadness May Impair Color Perception
This story was removed on November 5, 2015 because the research report on which it is based has been retracted. The full retraction notice is available online: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/26/11/1822.full
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Conversation Piece
The Chronicle of Higher Education: These quotations, in their various ways, get to a deceptively simple truth about good writing. That is, it should be similar to speech, but … The “but” is expressed by Sterne in “properly managed,” by Steffens in “would,” by Wilder in “the impression,” by Maugham in “should” and “well-bred.” Everyone knows that pure speech doesn’t work on the page. Transcribe any conversation (except maybe one between John Updike and Clive James) and you will see rampant halts and starts, “um”s and “uh”s, redundancies, ellipses, grammatical solecisms, and all manner of infelicities. ...
