by Melinda Wenner from Scientific American " Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing—it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social...

by Evan Lerner in Seed Magazine "When Max Lugavere and Jason Silva met at the University of Miami, they were two young idealists who found common ground in film, psychology, and philosophy. But when Al Gore announced his plans to start a TV network powered by a worldwide legion of socially minded...

By James F. Sumowski, Glenn R. Wylie, DPhil, Nancy Chiaravalloti, and John DeLuca "Learning and memory impairments are prevalent among persons with multiple sclerosis (MS); however, such deficits are only weakly associated with MS disease severity (brain atrophy). The cognitive reserve hypothesis...

Daniel M. Hausman and Brynn Welch One of the hottest ideas in current policy debates is “libertarian paternalism,” the design of policies that push individuals toward better choices without limiting their liberty. In their recent book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and then Obama advisor (now head of the White...

Stephen S. Hall "A compelling investigation into one of our most coveted and cherished ideals, and the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue. We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science...

From TED "Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics...

Vladas Griskevicius, Joshua M. Tybur, Bram Van den Bergh Why do people purchase proenvironmental “green” products? We argue that buying such products can be construed as altruistic, since green products often cost more and are of lower quality than their conventional counterparts, but green goods benefit...

by Igor Grossmann, Jinkyung Na, Michael E. W. Varnum, Denise C. Park, Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett It is well documented that aging is associated with cognitive declines in many domains. Yet it is a common lay belief that some aspects of thinking improve into old age. Speci fi cally, older...

The focus on complexity as a problem of the financial meltdown of 2008–2009 suggests that crisis is in part epistemological: we now know enough about financial and economic systems to be threatened by their complexity, but not enough to relieve our fears and anxieties about them. What marks the current...

Elizabeth Tricomi, Antonio Rangel, Colin F. Camerer, John P. O’Doherty A popular hypothesis in the social sciences is that humans have social preferences to reduce inequality in outcome distributions because it has a negative impact on their experienced reward. Although there is a large body of behavioural...

In this chapter we examine how effective leadership varies across national and cultural boundaries. Specifically, we ask what elements of leadership are core and more universal across these boundaries? The foundation of our approach is the notion that organizations and societies have implicit leadership...

Jorge F. del Valle, Amaia Bravo, Mónica López The authors carried out an assessment of social support networks with a sample of 884 Spanish adolescents aged 12 to 17. The main goal was to analyze the development of the figures of parents and peers as providers of social support in the two basic dimensions...