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+14 +1
Science Points to the Single Most Valuable Personality Trait
Research is pointing to conscientiousness as the one-trait-to-rule-them-all in terms of future success, both career-wise and personal. “It would actually be nice if there were some negative things that went along with conscientiousness,” Roberts told me. “But at this point it’s emerging as one of the primary dimensions of successful functioning across the lifespan. It really goes cradle to grave in terms of how people do.”
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+15 +1
Living a Lie: We Deceive Ourselves to Better Deceive Others
People mislead themselves all day long. We tell ourselves we’re smarter and better looking than our friends, that our political party can do no wrong, that we’re too busy to help a colleague. In 1976, in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the biologist Robert Trivers floated a novel explanation for such self-serving biases: We dupe ourselves in order to deceive others, creating social advantage. Now after four decades Trivers and his colleagues have published the first research supporting his idea.
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+2 +1
The Mysterious Power of Arrogance
Why do overbearing, obnoxious people so often come out on top? What a story from Papua New Guinea reveals about the rise of Donald Trump. By Joel Robbins, (Feb. 2, 2017)
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+17 +1
The five universal laws of human stupidity
We underestimate the stupid, and we do so at our own peril. By Corinne Purtill.
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+15 +1
Psych students score substantially lower on “dark” traits than business and law students
There are lots of stereotypes about the kind of people in different professions. Lawyers and business people are often caricatured as ruthless and self-interested, especially when compared to the kind of folk who enter professions usually seen as caring, such as nursing or psychology. To test the truth of these stereotypes, a new study in Personality and Individual Differences surveyed the “Dark Triad” and “Big Five” traits of hundreds of Danish students enrolled to begin studying either psychology, politics, business/economics or law.
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+15 +1
Why Liberals Aren’t as Tolerant as They Think
The political left might consider itself more open-minded than the right. But research shows that liberals are just as prejudiced against conservatives as conservatives are against liberals. By Matthew Hutson.
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+16 +1
Better educated parents have children who are more relaxed, outgoing and explorative
Exactly how parents shape their children is a matter of controversy, especially since Judith Rich Harris’ book The Nurture Assumption popularised the behavioural genetics position that the “shared environment” (so-called because it’s shared by siblings) – including the family home and parents’ methods of upbringing – has scant influence on how children turn out. But the debate is far from settled, and now a team chiefly from Florida State University has investigated whether more educated parents produce offspring with particular personality characteristics.
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+21 +1
A Stanford psychologist on the art of avoiding assholes
The world is full of assholes. Wherever you live, whatever you do, odds are you’re surrounded by assholes. The question is, what to do about it?
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+36 +1
How to Tell If You’re a Jerk
Here’s something you probably didn’t do this morning: Look in the mirror and ask, am I a jerk? It seems like a reasonable question. There are, presumably, genuine jerks in the world. And many of those jerks, presumably, have a pretty high moral opinion of themselves, or at least a moderate opinion of themselves. They don’t think of themselves as jerks, because jerk self-knowledge is hard to come by.
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+7 +1
Uncorrected Personality Traits
Robyn Hitchcock
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+8 +1
Study suggests your adulthood self-esteem has its roots in the way you were raised as a child
Studies of identical and non-identical twins indicate that our self-esteem is influenced by the genes we inherited from our parents, but also, and perhaps slightly more so, by environmental factors. And according to a new study in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, these environmental influences started playing a lasting role very early in life.
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+9 +1
People with strong self-control experience less intense bodily states like hunger and fatigue
You may think of people with high self-control as having enviable reserves of willpower, but recent findings suggest this isn’t the case. Instead it seems the strong-willed are canny folk, adept at avoiding temptation in the first place. A new study in the journal Self and Identity builds on this picture, showing that people high in self-control tend to experience less intense visceral states, like fatigue, hunger and stress (states that are known to encourage impulsive behaviour).
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+19 +1
'Facebook Addiction' Study: People Who Crave Social Acceptance At Higher Risk Of Using Facebook Compulsively
As one of the most popular websites in the world, and as — according to Statista — the leading global social network, Facebook may have changed the way we maintain social relationships. An issue of contention, however, remains. Relatively little is known about how heavy Facebook usage, and potential addiction, affects the human brain.
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+10 +1
How
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+2 +1
Grafeoiphobia is a furniture collection for desk-shy, bed-happy workers
Geoffrey Pascal has created a collection of office furniture that responds to the growing number of people working at home in their beds.
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+16 +1
Why Do People Mistake Narcissism for High Self-Esteem?
The "charismatic air" of narcissists-- from their flashy attire, to their self-assured behaviors, to their charming glances, to their witty humor-- often makes a big first impression. At the same time, people seem to be really good at accurately perceiving narcissism in others based on minimal information (even just physical appearance is usually enough of a cue to accurately perceive narcissism). Which raises an interesting question: why are narcissists-- which are characterized by extremely high levels of exhibitionism...
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+15 +1
If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it
Just by trying, even if you fail, you’ll have gained confidence because you’ll have attempted something in which the outcome was not predictable.
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+38 +1
The bad news on human nature, in 10 findings from psychology
It’s a question that’s reverberated through the ages – are humans, though imperfect, essentially kind, sensible, good-natured creatures? Or are we, deep down, wired to be bad, blinkered, idle, vain, vengeful and selfish? There are no easy answers, and there’s clearly a lot of variation between individuals, but here we shine some evidence-based light on the matter through 10 dispiriting findings that reveal the darker and less impressive aspects of human nature:
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+16 +1
People With Advantageous Personality Traits Have More Nerve-Fibre Insulation (Myelination) In Key Brain Areas
Researchers are getting closer to understanding the neurological basis of personality. For a new paper in the Journal of Personality, Nicola Toschi and Luca Passamonti took advantage of a recent technological breakthrough that makes it possible to use scans to estimate levels of myelination in different brain areas (until fairly recently this could only be done at postmortem).
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+9 +1
Cannabis dependence linked to changes in the processing of social rewards
New research provides evidence that cannabis dependence is linked to altered activity in the striatum when receiving a socially rewarding stimulus. The study has been published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology. “Current addiction theories propose that repeated drug use leads to lasting changes in motivational processes mediated by drug-induced adaptations in the brain reward systems, particularly the striatum,” said study co-author Benjamin Becker of neuSCAN Lab and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.
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