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Gloomy Thinking Can Be Contagious
NPR: When students show up at college in the fall, they’ll have to deal with new classes, new friends and a new environment. In many cases, they will also have new roommates — and an
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People Prefer ‘Carrots’ to ‘Sticks’ When It Comes to Healthcare Incentives
To keep costs low, companies often incentivize healthy lifestyles. Now, new research suggests that how these incentives are framed — as benefits for healthy-weight people or penalties for overweight people — makes a big difference.
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The Less We Know, the Surer We Are, Study Finds
Business Week: Here’s a study that rings true: People tend to hold more extreme positions on complex policies when they don’t know very much about them, according to a research article in the academic journal
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Can’t We All Just Get Along? What Psychology Tells Us About Political Gridlock
LiveScience: The U.S. government is broken. That is how Diane Halpern, a cognitive psychologist at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., opens her talks on the psychology of political partisanship. The divisions between the Republican
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Explain This: The Illusion Of Political Understanding
NPR: Should the United States impose unilateral sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program? Should we raise the retirement age for Social Security? Should we institute a national flat tax? How about implementing merit-based pay
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No, Having Bigger Biceps Does Not Make You More Conservative
Business Insider: A study by a group of researchers about biceps and politics that has made waves over the past couple of days following its publication in Psychological Science has been widely misinterpreted by several news outlets.