“And we are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now, and sometimes too impatient to learn the stories of how what is best in our era was made by long, slow campaigns of change.”
“The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients. Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring. The theory was that seeing so much suffering is a form of vicarious trauma that […]
“Allostasis is defined as “stability through change,” elegantly capturing the concept’s double meaning: The way to stay stable through the process of change is by changing, at least to some extent. If you want to hold your footing, you’ve got to keep moving.”
“An updated meta-analysis was published in July 2023 in the peer-reviewed journal Child Development. It was conducted by 14 researchers, the majority from Yale University, and it also found good results for SEL interventions in schools while simultaneously broadening the category of “social and emotional learning” to encompass even more non-academic skills. However, this latest […]
“For me, however, closed doors did two things. In some instances, I doubled down and persisted—50 rejections in applying for superintendent posts—in other instances, it nudged me to open doors that I had not considered–going from the failed attempt to manage a governmental research group riven by racial animosities to administering the Office of Staff […]
“One of the first obstacles is a reflexive negativity toward the idea of stopping something. Sloganeering about resilience and grit – “winners never quit and quitters never win,” for example – turn what should be rational decision making into a test of character. If we think of quitters as losers, we’ll err on the side […]
“Research shows that we easily habituate to material possessions. In contrast, experiences don’t lose their luster. Scientists sometimes refer to this asymmetry as the experiential advantage.”
“Finding pleasure in another person’s good fortune is what social scientists call “freudenfreude,” a term (inspired by the German word for “joy”) that describes the bliss we feel when someone else succeeds, even if it doesn’t directly involve us. Freudenfreude is like social glue, said Catherine Chambliss, a professor of psychology at Ursinus College. It […]
“While nudges can be effective strategies to change behavior, they are not appropriate for all policy goals. The following questions are essential for considering whether to deploy a nudge intervention:”
“With all the praise Apple receives, it can be easy to forget about the company’s many failures, some of which never made it to market. Apple is now the richest tech company in the world, but its ascendance wasn’t without its setbacks, some of which put the company on the brink of bankruptcy. Some of […]
“On the one hand, if we are solely responsible for the things we do wrong, some genuinely malevolent parties get off scot-free. On the other, if we locate responsibility entirely outside the individual, we relegate ourselves to sentient flotsam buffeted by currents beyond our control.”
“Without quite knowing why, I’ve always disliked the truism that conflict is drama’s fundamental ingredient. Yes, we fight and cajole and coax and settle scores: that’s our species, and it’s frequently how we show ourselves onstage. But this bit of craft wisdom—conflict is king—is the handmaiden of a paranoid anthropology, and a limited way of […]
“What do people value in life? How much of what gives people satisfaction in their lives is fundamental and shared across cultures, and how much is unique to a given society? To understand these and other issues, Pew Research Center posed an open-ended question about the meaning of life to nearly 19,000 adults across 17 […]
“I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue […]
“Researchers often describe awe as an emotion that combines an experience of vastness with both pleasure and a fear of the unknown. While many of us might consider these moments rare, ephemeral and tricky to reproduce, a few scientists are finding that this reverence is a skill that can be cultivated and has remarkable mental health benefits.”
“When we fail, we tune out. To avoid feeling bad about ourselves, we stop paying attention. As a result, we don’t learn from the experience. We do learn when failure is less personal. In our research, participants who struggled to learn from their own failures were able to learn from the failures of others. It can […]
“Copping to previous mistakes makes you come across as more knowledgeable because others assume that you have since figured things out. It takes expertise, observers intuit, to realize that you used to lack it—and confidence in your new position to say it out loud.”
“Think about the last time you asked someone for something. Maybe you were nervous or worried about what the person would think of you. Chances are that you didn’t stop to think about the pressure you exerted on that person. Psychologists say we are often consumed with our own perspective, and fail to see the signs that […]
“Curiosity is not influenced by long-term learning goals. That’s why, even though I’m a psychologist who loves his work, I still might be bored at a talk on psychology. But Internet content that promises quick and easy information draws my attention even if, after the fact, it doesn’t seem worth my time.”
“Try taking charge of your attention. Avert your gaze from whatever tempts you. Focus instead on whatever makes achieving your goals easier. Your future self will thank you for it.”
“For most of us, hard work makes us passionate for a field rather than the other way around. We develop passion for what we do over time, rather than starting out with a clear, defined passion for a particular career path… A well-rooted sense of purpose, in other words, gives you way more grit than passion alone […]
“Capital City educators said they take steps to ensure that their process is fair and geared toward helping students improve. Students are measured on traits like reflection and accountability in the context of their academic work, school officials said. A research-heavy science project that involves numerous revisions and multiple draft deadlines, for example, provides an […]
“A compelling curriculum that puts character at the core promotes equity, empowers students through active learning protocols, and studies character through real-world and literary examples. Such curriculum creates opportunities to connect texts to local issues, takes students out into the community, and builds students’ capacity to give back to their community.”
““Right now it’s like this,” works as a mantra… It doesn’t solve any practical problems. But it does get you into the right mental state to contemplate your situation calmly. It helps make you responsive, not reactive.”
“Hypotheses force individuals to articulate in advance why they believe a given course of action will succeed. A failure then exposes an incorrect hypothesis — which can more reliably convert into… learning.”
“His reasoning, oversimplified, is this: Complex societies are possible and durable only when people are emotionally invested in, and help, one another; we’d be living in smaller units and more solitary fashions if we weren’t equipped for such collaboration; and human thriving within these societies guarantees future generations suited to them.”
The first thing you will learn when meeting Dan Smith is that while he definitely has a sense of humor about his public persona, he is very sincere and very serious about what he does—especially about how learning to play guitar can teach you how to live.”
“Christakis and his colleagues mapped out the face-to-face interactions of about 5,000 people living in one town over the course of 32 years. Their emotional ups and downs were documented with periodic surveys. We were able to show that as one person became happy or sad, it rippled through the network, Christakis says.”
Hope scores are significant predictors of average daily attainment and GPA, Hellman said. Hope is a better predictor of first-year college performance than the SAT, ACT or high school GPA.”
“From elementary school through college, girls are more disciplinedabout their schoolwork than boys; they study harder and get better grades. Girls consistently outperform boys academically. And yet, men nonetheless hold a staggering 95 percent of the top positions in the largest public companies. What if those same habits that propel girls to the top of their class — their hyper-conscientiousness about schoolwork — […]
We may not have control, but we have choices. With intention and focused attention, we can always find a forward path. We discover what we are looking for. If we look for evidence of love in the universe, we will find it. If we seek beauty, it will spill into our lives any moment we […]
“Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness.”
“Schools have, for some years, been experimenting with honesty shops in a part of India where theft was so commonplace in the past that the people who lived in this community were called kallars — a Tamil word that means “thief.
Another growth factor, BDNF, promotes neurogenesis in animals and may enhance resilience in humans. The good news is that we have some control over our own brain BDNF levels: Getting more physical exercise and social support, for example, has been shown to increase BDNF.”
Successful people engage in project after project after project. They don’t just count their winnings; they buy more lottery tickets. They keep producing.”
“Tweeting and trolling are easy. Mastering the arts of conversation and measured debate is hard. Texting is easy. Writing a proper letter is hard. Looking stuff up on Google is easy. Knowing what to search for in the first place is hard. Having a thousand friends on Facebook is easy. Maintaining six or seven close […]
“The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) theorised that ‘collective effervescence’ – moments in which people come together in some form of unifying, excitement-inducing activity – is at the root of what holds groups together. More recently, Bronwyn Tarr, an evolutionary biologist and psychologist at the University of Oxford who is also a dancer, has researched […]
“Lightman ends with concrete, practical prescriptions: 10-minute silences during school days, “introspective” college courses that give students more time to reflect, electronics-free rooms at work, unplugged hours at home.”
“Goals. Are. Awesome… But your goal shouldn’t be the thing that’s pulling you forward… What’s pulling you forward should be your recognition that what you’re trying to attain is worth it. Motivation should be a side effect of that.”
“Happily, studies also find that it’s not hard to convert people to the stress-is-enhancing perspective. To do this in my own work with adolescents, I liken the demands of school to a strength-training program.”
D&D gives us a powerful tool to explore new realities and how those realities are built: through action, choices, community, negotiation, resilience and responsibility… It’s not a novelty that stories change the world, but by exercising all those characteristics in a game, it becomes an obvious lesson: If you want to make any change, change the […]
Effective communication is not simply about getting your message out. It requires you to strategically tap into what shapes people’s feelings and values. Here we share five principles pulled from social science that will help you connect your work to what people care most about.”
“The goal should be to inject unpredictability into your life to keep your brain learning. Stability can be restful, but science shows it will teach you pretty much nothing.”
“It tracks every time a volunteer has a touchpoint with one of the students — driving to school, sharing a meal. Hemminger calls it the Fitbit of social relationships. Tapestry can track how often a student has touchpoints, who hasn’t had a touchpoint, how many touchpoints lead to what outcomes.”
“Researchers have found that certain health behaviors appear to be contagious and that our social networks — in person and online — can influence obesity, anxiety and overall happiness. A recent report found that a person’s exercise routine was strongly influenced by his or her social network.”
“A study of 6,200 children… found that elevated curiosity was linked to higher math and literacy skills among kindergarteners. That effect remained strong even when researchers compared kids with similar levels of “effortful control,” or the ability to concentrate and pay attention. Even more surprising, she discovered that students from impoverished backgrounds with a strong […]
“Consumers motivated by pleasure believe that what pleases them differs greatly from what pleases most other people. They will therefore prefer a large assortment. But when seeking to meet a utilitarian need with the same product, they are less inclined to see their preferences as being greatly different from those of other people. They will […]
“Bostyn wonders if people who are presented with standard trolley hypotheticals give biased answers because they’re worried about their reputations. They might think that if they told the experimenter they’d flip the switch or push the stranger off the bridge, it would make them seem cold and calculating. To avoid that outcome, they tilt their […]
“Ultimately, the new study finds limited support for the idea that being able to delay gratification leads to better outcomes. Instead, it suggests that the capacity to hold out for a second marshmallow is shaped in large part by a child’s social and economic background.”
“Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that—at low levels of competence—holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others’ cunning.”
“For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In […]
“That’s the takeaway from new Australian research, which finds a university education has a positive impact on two key personality traits—extroversion and agreeableness.”
Both research and real-life examples show us that if kindness and empathy are modeled to kids in everyday life they are much more likely to continue this attitude into middle school and beyond. Modeling empathy starts early. Research indicates that if parents use more descriptive language in explaining how other people might be feeling, even […]
“My central argument when it comes to happiness is that if you try to get happier, it’s a recipe for neurosis. That usually doesn’t work. But you can set up your environment so you’re more likely to be happy.”
There it was in black and white, the thing that has been unfolding for decades: The robot presented as empathy machine—an object that presents itself as worthy of your empathic response, and as having an empathic reaction to you. But objects can’t do this.”
In the end, I received 60 rejections for The Help. But letter number 61 was the one that accepted me. After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection, an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even […]
Girls have always known they were allowed to feel anything — except anger. Now girls, led by women, are being told they can own righteous anger. Now they can feel what they want and be what they want. There’s no commensurate lesson for boys in our culture.”
I’ve come to realize there are two types of “busy.” My anxiety continues to mount unless I identify which I am experiencing and act accordingly. 1. Attention is constrained… 2. Time is Constrained”
People who report frequent feelings of time scarcity are less happy and more prone to anxiety and depression than people who report feeling time affluent.”
“Hurry slowly” has its roots in an old Latin phrase: “Festina Lente,” or “Make haste slowly,” or “more haste, less speed.” (See: The Tortoise and The Hare.)”
“Optimistic people live almost eight years longer than the glass-half-empties do.”
The idea of deliberately being “bad” at a game feels so entirely wrong to me. Decades of playing to win, of striving to improve and be better until victory, have taught me that deliberately failing a quest is lunacy… But if I’ve learned anything from D&D, it’s that winning isn’t the goal – it’s about […]
Feeling bad might actually be a good thing if you’re using it to persevere in the future.”
Researchers have been administering the [marshmallow] test to groups of kids for over 50 years now, which leads to a natural question: Have kids’ abilities to delay gratification gotten better or worse over the years? …he gathered and analyzed the results of over 30 published marshmallow test trials administered between 1968 and 2017.”
I also remain skeptical of growth mindset and grit because they are very difficult to disentangle from deficit perspectives of students and from monolithic, thus reductive, views of identifiable groups by race, class, gender, or educational outcomes.”
Long road to reusability of Falcon 9 primary boost stage”
The researchers found that individuals were more particular about whom they included in their trust networks compared to groups related to fun and excitement. In those selective trust networks, freshmen were more likely to include highly empathic students.”
Not only did the children shrug when the rewards disappeared… they also welcomed the character-infused approach to learning. Teachers overheard students talking about being responsible and respectful. Kids who ordinarily kept quiet in class volunteered frequently, and more stepped up to help their classmates.”
Even adaptive competencies become maladaptive if taken to the extreme… For example, extreme resilience could drive people to become overly persistent with unattainable goals.”
There’s emphatic swearing, for instance, which is meant to highlight a point, and dysphemistic swearing, which is meant to make a point provocatively. But swearing is beneficial beyond making your language more colorful. It can also offer catharsis. A study… found that swearing can increase your ability to withstand pain.”
While the jury is out on giftedness being innate and other factors potentially making the difference, what is certain is that the behaviours associated with high levels of performance are replicable and most can be taught – even traits such as curiosity.”
Students with gifted curiosity outperformed their peers on a wide range of educational outcomes, including math and reading, SAT scores, and college attainment. According to ratings from teachers, the motivationally gifted students worked harder and learned more.”
A consortium of academics soon formed to share resources, and programs have quietly proliferated since then: the Success-Failure Project at Harvard, which features stories of rejection; the Princeton Perspective Project, encouraging conversation about setbacks and struggles; Penn Faces at the University of Pennsylvania, a play on the term used by students to describe those who […]
What drives this increase in lying sophistication is the development of a child’s ability to put himself or herself in someone else’s shoes. Known as theory of mind, this is the facility we acquire for understanding the beliefs, intentions, and knowledge of others. Also fundamental to lying is the brain’s executive function: the abilities required […]
Once you begin paying attention, the dichotomy of control has countless applications to everyday life, and all of them have to do with one crucial move: shifting your goals from external outcomes to internal achievements.”
“When we always yield to our children’s wants, we rob them of the opportunity to find solutions by adapting what they already have. Kids who learn from denial realize at an early age that they won’t always have the perfect tool for every job. They might not know something, have something, or be something. But […]
I’m hooked on the pursuit of those moments, however elusive they may be. But it’s not the momentary high that has sustained me. In the process of trying to attain a few moments of bliss, I experience something else: patience and humility, definitely, but also freedom. Freedom to pursue the futile. And the freedom to […]
If we understand the inherent structural inequalities that lurk below the surface of emotional labor, we might all hesitate before asking teachers and students to pledge their allegiance to passion and grit.”
Reading what you hate helps you refine what it is you value”
“Find your calling… Practice smart… Think like an optimist”
Enviable as the cool kids may have seemed, Dr. Prinstein’s studies show negative consequences.”
The research that Dr. Fredrickson and others have done demonstrates that the extent to which we can generate positive emotions from even everyday activities can determine who flourishes and who doesn’t. More than a sudden bonanza of good fortune, repeated brief moments of positive feelings can provide a buffer against stress and depression and foster […]
“Willpower may simply be a pre-scientific idea—one that was born from social attitudes and philosophical speculation rather than research, and enshrined before rigorous experimental evaluation of it became possible. The term has persisted into modern psychology because it has a strong intuitive hold on our imagination: Seeing willpower as a muscle-like force does seem to […]
“Engaging in spontaneous self-affirmation was related to greater happiness, hopefulness, optimism, subjective health, and personal health efficacy, and less anger and sadness.”
“When teachers and administrators say they want kids to have a growth mindset, the school environment has to back up that rhetoric. At Arroyo, the emphasis on growth mindset came alongside a shift to standards-based grading. Kids can see that mistakes along the way aren’t negatively affecting them and keep working to master the concepts.”
All are tending to one and the same goal, at least all aspire to the same goal, from the wise man to the lowest murderer, but only by different ways. It is an old truth, but there is this new in it: I cannot go far astray. I saw the truth. I saw and know […]
“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.”