I have been a college professor for more than thirty years, and an important part of my job is working individually with graduate students who are writing doctoral dissertations. Over the years, I have supervised about fifty of these, learning to be one part cheerleader and two parts crossing guard: Bring it on, but look [...]
When studying a variety of subjects or working on a variety of projects, it is more difficult to do similar things right after each other than dissimilar things. For example, don’t study English then your foreign language then math then science. Instead, study English, then math, then the foreign language, then science. Don’t work on [...]
Play in our species serves many valuable purposes. It is a means by which children develop their physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and moral capacities. It is a means of creating and preserving friendships. It also provides a state of mind that, in adults as well as children, is uniquely suited for high-level reasoning, insightful problem [...]
One of the more peculiar findings to emerge from my laboratory over the past few years is what I’ve termed the posthumous effect, the tendency to psychologically alter our perceptions of the recently dead in a favourable direction.
In one study, participants were misled to think we were investigating how physical appearance influences people’s judgments of [...]
Noah benShea’s book The Word: Jewish Wisdom Through Time tells a Yiddish folktale that shows how where we came from and to whom we may want to go affect our predisposition:
An old man sat outside the walls of a great city. When travelers approached they would ask the old man: "What kind of people live [...]
