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Why I give my students a ‘tragedy of the commons’ extra credit challenge
The Washington Post: Imagine you’re a student and your teacher poses this challenge to the entire class: You can each earn some extra credit on your term paper. You get to choose whether you want 2 points added to your grade, or 6 points. But there’s a catch: if more than 10% of the class selects 6 points, then no one gets any points. All selections are anonymous, and the course grades are not curved. I pose this exact challenge to students each semester in my social psychology course at the University of Maryland. This summer, one of my students happened to tweet about it, and his reaction went viral.
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Know-It-Alls More Likely To Accept Falsehoods as Fact, Study Shows
TIME: People who consider themselves experts in a given topic are more likely to claim knowledge of made-up “facts” about that topic, a new study shows. Researchers conducted a series of experiments to assess how likely people were to believe fictions presented as fact. In one of the experiments, for example, the researchers had 100 people rate their level of knowledge for personal finance by describing their familiarity with 15 different financial terms. Read the whole story: TIME
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The Paradox of Effort
The Atlantic: Denying instant gratification in deference to long-term goals is virtuous, people tell me. Those people might be right. Psychologists call it self-regulation or self-control. And together with conscientiousness, it’s at least a trait (or a coping mechanism) that’s reasonably good at predicting a young person’s future. People with less self-control are more likely to end up where the world tells them to go. Even in the worst circumstances, people with the most self-control and resilience have the highest likelihood of defying odds—poverty, bad schools, unsafe communities—and going on to achieve much academically and professionally.
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Friend Fail: When Your Partner Dislikes Your Pals
The Wall Street Journal: About a year after she started to date her boyfriend, Shanon Leespotted a potential deal breaker: his friends. She saw how much his pals, men and women, drank and cursed, texted crude jokes late at night and canceled plans at the last minute. They seemed to call only when they needed something, such as advice or money, she says. Ms. Lee didn’t complain to her boyfriend about his friends. Instead, she tried to gently point out their shortcomings. When they’d let her boyfriend down, she would ask, “Do you think this is a problem?” But after one friend asked to borrow $1,000—for a vacation—and her boyfriend ponied up the cash, Ms. Lee offered him an ultimatum.
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In Court, Your Face Could Determine Your Fate
NPR: Your face has a profound effect on the people around you. Its expression can prompt assumptions about how kind, mean or trustworthy you are. And for some people, a study finds, it could help determine their fate in court. Individuals who are deemed to have untrustworthy faces are significantly more likely to be on death row compared with other people convicted of murder, according to a study published Wednesday in Psychological Science. Inmates thought to have trustworthy faces, however, have a higher chance of receiving the more lenient punishment of life in prison.
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Self-Proclaimed Experts More Vulnerable to the Illusion of Knowledge
Research reveals that the more people think they know about a topic in general, the more likely they are to allege knowledge of completely made-up information and false facts.
