Art Markman, Ph.D.: The Smartest Way to Overcome an Obstacle Few important things in life come easy. Starting in school, there are days where assignments just don't go well. That concept you thought you had nailed in class has flown from your mind by the time you sit down to do your work. As you get older, the obstacles get more varied. You might want to buy a great new car, but you don't have the money. Dealing with obstacles is a crucial part of being successful in life. Sometimes, of course, we just push through the obstacles. When you're faced with a new obstacle, though, this kind of automatic reminding won't work. To get the intuition behind this, consider a simple experiment from this paper. Of course, this result isn't that surprising. Experiencing an obstacle also affected conceptual processing. This conceptual study also allowed the authors to demonstrate an important quality of this increase in thinking globally following an obstacle. What does this mean for you? Your motivation system wants to help you achieve your goals.
The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis What about the ratings agencies? That's what "they" always say about the financial crisis and the teeming rat's nest of corruption it left behind. Everybody else got plenty of blame: the greed-fattened banks, the sleeping regulators, the unscrupulous mortgage hucksters like spray-tanned Countrywide ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo. But what about the ratings agencies? Man, are they ever. Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation's two top ratings companies, Moody's and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash. [Read more from Rolling Stone: Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever] Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.
10 Practical Uses For Psychological Research in Everyday Life People love to give each other advice. The web is full to bursting with all types of pseudo-psychological advice about life. The problem is, how much of this is based on real scientific evidence? Well, here on PsyBlog we’ve got the scientific evidence. So here’s my top 10 list of what you can learn practically from the psychological research discussed here recently. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
List of cognitive biases In psychology and cognitive science, cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment.[1][2] They are often studied in psychology, sociology and behavioral economics.[1] A memory bias is a cognitive bias that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. Explanations include information-processing rules (i.e., mental shortcuts), called heuristics, that the brain uses to produce decisions or judgments. Biases have a variety of forms and appear as cognitive ("cold") bias, such as mental noise,[3] or motivational ("hot") bias, such as when beliefs are distorted by wishful thinking. There are also controversies over some of these biases as to whether they count as useless or irrational, or whether they result in useful attitudes or behavior. [edit] Association: Baseline:
How to Get Out of a Slump Edit Article Edited by SantaPaws, Teresa, Spyagent, Nicole Willson and 9 others It can happen to any one of us on occasion––doing well in life can suddenly seem to come to a screeching halt, to be replaced by doubts, frustration and a sense of the blues even. When you're in a slump, be it your career, your sports game, your studies or your personal life, it's not pleasant. In fact, it can be confusing and hard to feel motivated to do anything more than feel stuck. However, your general feeling of malaise and dissatisfaction is telling you something pointed––it's time to reroute your direction and start finding a new pathway to a brighter future for yourself. Most of a journey to pick yourself up and out of a slump is going to be a very personal and internally guided one (provided that you trust your own voice). Ad Steps 1Relax. 12Reward yourself when you reach milestones in your goal. Tips Stay focused on the end result when you feel as if the slump is lasting for ages. Warnings
Why Borders Disfigure Landscapes as Well as Thoughts | Politics on GOOD In 1989, as a first-year university student, I photographed the fall of the Berlin Wall in my hometown. It became the very symbol for the downfall of the USSR as a superpower and the end of a world order that had shaped our planet and lives for almost half a century. It was the most exciting and positive political event I’ve witnessed—a first-hand experience of history in the making which deeply moved me. During that time, many people believed that this would be the end of walls as a political instrument and we'd put them on the garbage heap of history as an anachronistic tool. Israel | Occupied Palestinian Territories The Iron Curtain | former German - German border A barrier is the proof of human weakness and error, and the inability of human beings to communicate with each other. Ceuta and Melilla, Spain | Morocco Baghdad Cyprus | Greenline South-Korea | North-Korea USA | Mexico Globalization promised us an ending, a dissolution of borders.
The Ten Most Revealing Psych Experiments Psychology is the study of the human mind and mental processes in relation to human behaviors - human nature. Due to its subject matter, psychology is not considered a 'hard' science, even though psychologists do experiment and publish their findings in respected journals. Some of the experiments psychologists have conducted over the years reveal things about the way we humans think and behave that we might not want to embrace, but which can at least help keep us humble. That's something. 1. The Robbers Cave Experiment is a classic social psychology experiment conducted with two groups of 11-year old boys at a state park in Oklahoma, and demonstrates just how easily an exclusive group identity is adopted and how quickly the group can degenerate into prejudice and antagonism toward outsiders. Researcher Muzafer Sherif actually conducted a series of 3 experiments. 2. The prisoners rebelled on the second day, and the reaction of the guards was swift and brutal. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Top 10 Common Faults In Human Thought Humans The human mind is a wonderful thing. Cognition, the act or process of thinking, enables us to process vast amounts of information quickly. For example, every time your eyes are open, you brain is constantly being bombarded with stimuli. The Gambler’s fallacy is the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality, they are not. Reactivity is the tendency of people to act or appear differently when they know that they are being observed. Pareidolia is when random images or sounds are perceived as significant. Interesting Fact: the Rorschach Inkblot test was developed to use pareidolia to tap into people’s mental states. Self-fulfilling Prophecy Self-fulfilling prophecy is engaging in behaviors that obtain results that confirm existing attitudes. Interesting Fact: Economic Recessions are self-fulfilling prophecies. Herd mentality is the tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict.
Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. In one experiment a group of people were randomly given one of two gifts — half received a decorated mug, the other half a large Swiss chocolate bar. 3. 4.
Leap Year Project: A Prototype for Radically Experiential Learning | Education on GOOD Can young people create their own education? If so, how should they do it? For me, the roots of the question lie in the fact that I've always been hopeful. At a young age hope seemed sparse after my family life deteriorated due to a divorce and subsequent challenges. During my senior year of high school, I brought my Middle Eastern parents into the same room to share that I wouldn't be pursuing the expected route of becoming a doctor. I also began working for a student program at a church in the west suburbs of Chicago. My work made me curious about further education in business, design, and simply learning how I could make a difference. I began interviewing hundreds of friends, family, peers, college students, and professors, asking droves of questions about learning methods, practices, ideas, and personal dreams. When I explained I was thinking of creating my own education, people were partly intrigued and perplexed. So, can we create a new type of education?
Your Evolved Intuitions Part of the sequence: Rationality and Philosophy We have already examined one source of our intuitions: attribute substitution heuristics. Today we examine a second source of our intuitions: biological evolution. Evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology1 has been covered on Less Wrong many times before, but let's review anyway. Lions walk on four legs and hunt for food. Certain evolved psychological mechanisms in humans are part of what makes us like each other and not like lions, skunks, and spiders. These mechanisms evolved to solve specific adaptive problems. An an example of evolutionary psychology at work, consider the 'hunter-gatherer hypothesis' that men evolved psychological mechanisms to aid in hunting, while women evolved psychological mechanisms to aid in gathering.6 This hypothesis leads to a list of bold predictions. And as it turns out, all these predictions are correct.7 (And no, evolutionary psychologists do not only offer 'postdictions' or 'just so' stories. Notes
The 33 Digital Skills Every 21st Century Teacher should Have By EdTech Team Updated on march 2, 2015 : The original list that was created in 2011 comprised 33 skills , after reviewing it we decided to do some merging and finally ended up with the 20 skills below. The 21st century teacher should be able to : 1- Create and edit digital audio Here are some tools for teachers to develop this skill :Free Audio Tools for Teachers 2- Use Social bookmarking to share resources with and between learners Here are some tools for teachers to develop this skill : A List of Best Bookmarking Websites for Teachers 3- Use blogs and wikis to create online platforms for students Here are some tools for teachers to develop this skill : Great Tools to Create Protected Blogs and Webpages for your Class 4- Exploit digital images for classroom use Here are some tools for teachers to develop this skill :Web Tools to Edit Pictures without Installing any softwareTools to Convert Photos into Cartoons