5 Posts found for source_year: 2021

Cognitive flexibility is a skill that enables us to switch between different concepts, or to adapt behaviour to achieve goals in a novel or changing environment. It is essentially about learning to learn and being able to be flexible about the way you learn. This includes changing strategies for optimal decision-making.

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Cognitive flexibility provides us with the ability to see that what we are doing is … [ Read more ]

Authors: Barbara Jacquelyn Sahakian, Christelle Langley, Victoria Leong | Source: The Conversation (June 21, 2021) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Thought | Inquiry

The value flows from corporations to households through eight different pathways. If you take a dollar of revenue that the average corporation generates, 25 cents of that flows through as labor income: wages, salaries, and other benefits to employees. Seven cents of that dollar goes to capital income, meaning dividends, share buybacks, and interest payments to debtholders. Six cents goes to investment—earnings that are retained … [ Read more ]

Authors: Clarisse Magnin-Mallez, Michael Birshan, Sean Brown | Source: McKinsey Quarterly (November 12, 2021) | Subjects: Business, Economics | Economy, Excerpts

Since the 1950s, political scientists have theorized that political polarization—increased numbers of “political partisans” who view the world with an ideological bias—is associated with an inability to tolerate uncertainty and a need to hold predictable beliefs about the world.

But little is known about the biological mechanisms through which such biased perceptions arise.

To investigate that question, scientists measured and compared the brain activity of committed partisans … [ Read more ]

Authors: Corrie Pikul-Brown, David J. Halpern, Jeroen van Baar, Oriel FeldmanHall | Source: Futurity (May 14, 2021) | Subjects: Excerpts, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

Since 1992, people have been talking about “Dunbar’s number,” the supposed upper limit of the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships. Named for British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, its value, rounded from 148 to 150, has permeated both professional and popular culture. […] It’s also probably wrong. Despite its fame, Dunbar’s number has always been controversial. A new study … [ Read more ]

Authors: Robin Dunbar, Scotty Hendricks | Source: Big Think (May2021) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Five key fallacies and pitfalls have affected public-health messaging, as well as media coverage, and have played an outsize role in derailing an effective pandemic response. These problems were deepened by the ways that we—the public—developed to cope with a dreadful situation under great uncertainty.

Risk Compensation

One of the most important problems undermining the pandemic response has been the mistrust and paternalism that some public-health agencies … [ Read more ]

Author: Zeynep Tufekci | Source: The Atlantic (February 26, 2021) | Subjects: Excerpts, Health & Medicine, Politics & Public Policy