Category: Psychology & Anthropology

People trust their peers much more than they trust their political leaders or news organizations.

For 16 years, Edelman’s company has been surveying people around the world on their trust in various institutions. And one of the firm’s findings is that people are especially likely these days to describe “a person like me”—a friend or, say, a Facebook friend—as a credible source of information. A “person like me” is now viewed as twice as credible as a government leader

Source: From Trump to Brexit: Trust in Government Is Collapsing Around the World – The Atlantic

Five tactics to keep company culture healthy.

Look for empire builders, self-servers, and whiners in the hiring process — and don’t hire them.

Take the incentive out of “climbing the ladder.”

Be open and transparent, and create opportunities for voices to be heard.

Make everyone accountable, so personal bias can’t creep into decision making.

Train your leaders to effectively manage politics out of conversations.

At Facebook, we’ve found these tactics helpful in maintaining a productive company culture. Interoffice maneuvering is a distraction. Working to stop politics before it starts results in a stronger organization and empowered, motivated teams.

Source: How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics

How much do you really need to say to put a sentence together?

When a language seems especially telegraphic, usually another factor has come into play: Enough adults learned it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down “schoolroom” version of itself.

only a few languages have been taken up as vehicles of empire and imposed on millions of unsuspecting and underqualified adults.

Source: The World’s Most Efficient Languages – The Atlantic

So—taking all of this into account, I have come up with five primary elements involved in increasing your fluid intelligence, or cognitive ability.

These five primary principles are:

1. Seek Novelty
2. Challenge Yourself
3. Think Creatively
4. Do Things The Hard Way
5. Network

Source: You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential – Scientific American Blog Network

Fears of civilization-wide idleness are based too much on the downsides of being unemployed in a society premised on the concept of employment.

Source: Would a Work-Free World Be So Bad? – The Atlantic