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The Neurology of Lending
Back in 1976, a young professor in Bangladesh starting making dubious low-interest loans to the rural poor of his country. Yunus Muhammad had the crazy idea that even impoverished farmers—men and women without credit history
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Research Confirms That Humble Bragging Doesn’t Work, It’s Just Really Annoying
The Huffington Post: Before you share the news about your recent job promotion on Facebook, consider this: Researchers have found that a little humble-bragging can backfire. In other words, your false modesty is pretty transparent
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A question of etiquette: do you hold the door for others?
The Guardian: Whether one person holds a door open for another is not simply a question of etiquette, says a study by Joseph P Santamaria and David A Rosenbaum of Pennsylvania State University. No, they
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Humblebrags Aren’t Making People Happy For You
Futurity: The “humblebrag” and other forms of self-promotion often backfire, a new study finds. The researchers wanted to find out why so many people frequently get the trade-off between self-promotion and modesty wrong. They found
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Sophie Scott and the Science of Laughter
The Wall Street Journal: The first time that the neuroscientist Sophie Scott performed standup comedy, in 2010, she did it out of professional jealousy. One of her colleagues at University College London had done his
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Why Do We Experience Awe?
The New York Times: HERE’S a curious fact about goose bumps. In many nonhuman mammals, goose bumps — that physiological reaction in which the muscles surrounding hair follicles contract — occur when individuals, along with
