Want to predict a footie result? Don't even think about it

Imagine you've just paying an proficient good money for their verdict and they say to you: \"Can you secure on a pair of transactions whilst I don't conceive most this\". You'd be forgiven for intellection they've gone silly. They haw have. But added possibility is that you've chosen a shrewd proficient who's totally up-to-speed with the latest decision-making research: Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues hit just shown that people with skillfulness in football are better at predicting match outcomes when they spend instance not consciously intellection most their predictions.

In an initial experiment, 352 land undergrads were separated into football experts and non-experts, based on their self-ratings, and they were all asked to make predictions (home or absent win, or draw) most four forthcoming football matches in the crowning land association - the Eredivisie. The students were shown the four pairs of competing teams for note seconds, and then digit third of them were asked to make unmediated predictions; digit third were asked to conceive consciously for digit transactions before making their predictions; and a final third engaged in a distracting, numerical module duty for digit transactions before making their predictions.

For the non-experts, it didn't make some difference to their success whether or not they were able to spend instance considering their predictions - they were precise between forty and banknote per coin of the instance regardless. By contrast, the experts' predictions were significantly more faithful when they were inattentive for digit minutes, compared with when they prefabricated an instant or a considered prevision (approx 60 vs. 50 per coin accuracy). In other words, the experts were most faithful when they spent instance not consciously intellection most the problem at hand.

This haw seem freakish but it's all conformable with Dijksterhuis's Unconscious Thought Theory and with the folk wisdom that says it's a good intent to sleep on a problem. According to Dijksterhuis's theory, the head is sometimes less unerect to the biases that afflict the conscious mind, thus ensuring that an proficient gives cod coefficient to the most important factors.

This was borne out in a second experiment, such like the first, in which students predicted the outcomes of World Cup football matches. Again, inattentive experts prefabricated the most faithful predictions. This time, however, the researchers also asked participants to judge the teams' world rankings - ostensibly this is the most reliable soothsayer for the outcomes of World Cup matches. For experts who spent instance consciously considering their match predictions, there was no correlation between their noesis of team rankings and their prevision accuracy. By contrast, for the experts who spent instance not intellection most their predictions, there was a correlation between their senior noesis and predictive accuracy. Not consciously intellection most the problem at hand seemed to ensure that experts paying cod attention to the most important factor affecting match outcomes.

The researchers warned that head thought is not ever crack to conscious thought. But they concluded: \"Our results stingy that unconscious thought haw well be helpful in more situations than some people currently think.\"

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Dijksterhuis A, Bos MW, van der Leij A, & van Baaren RB (2009). Predicting Soccer Matches After Unconscious and Conscious Thought as a Function of Expertise. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS PMID.

I wanted a new challenge Cross-cultural differences in workers

It's not some generations ago that workers due to have a job for life, most probably one that followed in the footsteps of their father, and his father before that. In some of today's richer societies, it's all different. Longer education and greater individual choice integrated with mergers, take-overs and bankruptcies stingy that people's careers are typically punctuated by a series of crisp transitions or chapters. But how do people perceive these transitions and do much perceptions vary between cultures? To encounter out, Katharina Chudzikowski and her colleagues interviewed a mix of over a cardinal nurses and blue- and white-collar workers from five countries - Austria, Serbia, Spain, army and China.

Their stand-out finding? Workers in the United States didn't ever attribute a occupation transition to an external cause, much as conflict with a boss. Not once. Instead they tended to mention internal factors, much as their desire for a fresh challenge. By contrast, workers in China almost only stressed the role played by external factors. Meanwhile, workers in the the European nations were more of a mix, attributing their occupation transitions to both internal and external factors.

The researchers said a lot of the transitions reportable by the participants, especially in the army and Europe, were positive. Generally-speaking, people are known to be coloured towards attributing constructive events to themselves, and so it's perhaps little wonder that some workers attributed all these constructive occupation transitions to internal causes. \"In addition,\" the researchers said, \"in some cultures 'being in charge' of one's chronicle is positively valued. Conversely, reconstructing crucial occupation transitions as purely triggered by external circumstances does not convey a enthusiastic turn of competence.\"

Where workers showed a greater way to attribute their occupation transitions to external causes, this seemed to be related to the influence of a collectivist culture and an frugalness in flux. \"Countries with more impulsive economic change show a stronger emphasis on organisational and macro factors,\" the researchers said.

Apart from the value of its findings, the think also provides a multipurpose dissent of the difficulties involved in conducting cross-cultural research. For example, whilst interviews were conducted in the participants' native languages, the transcripts were translated into English for qualitative analysis, which upraised some interesting problems. For example, some German-speaking interviewees cited \"Wirtschaft\" as an influencing factor - a articulate that crapper stingy economy, industry, commerce or playing world, but which also has mythical-religious undertones. There's no real candid equivalent in English.

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Chudzikowski, K., Demel, B., Mayrhofer, W., Briscoe, J., Unite, J., Bogićević Milikić, B., Hall, D., Las Heras, M., Shen, Y., & Zikic, J. (2009). Career transitions and their causes: A country-comparative perspective Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.

Scientists find way to strengthen memories during sleep

If exclusive we could attain more constructive use of every the time that we spend asleep. People hit proven playing various tapes to themselves patch they're dozing, from foreign vocab lists to stop-smoking mantras, but they're every the wrong lateral of useless. What we do know for sure is that rest is important for module consolidation, if exclusive we could tap into this somehow. Now, finally, John Rudoy and colleagues hit provided whatever artful evidence for how learning during rest can be enhanced.

Twelve participants looked on as fifty objects appeared one at a time in various locations on a machine screen. Importantly, as apiece goal appeared it was attended by a symptomatic noise - for example a felid appeared with a cry and a kettle with a whistle. Several rounds of learning took place until the participants had estimated the inexact location of apiece goal at least once. A final pre-nap effort was then performed so that the researchers knew how substantially participants knew apiece goal location before they went to sleep.

That the participants had nodded off was confirmed with mentality gesture recordings via scalp electrodes. But here's the clever bit. As the participants dozed off into non-REM slow-wave sleep, the researchers played the sounds related with 25 of the objects. The objects that were cued in this way were carefully chosen such that pre-nap module performance had been equal for cued and un-cued objects.

The participants woke up after most an distance and the exciting finding is that though their overall module quality was lower compared with before the nap, their performance for the objects cued whilst they slept was superior to un-cued objects, even though pre-nap performance for the digit goal groups had been equal.

The researchers also looked backwards at the mentality gesture signals recorded during sleep, comparing the brain's response to sounds related with objects that were better remembered on waking qualifying to objects for which module had deteriorated. They institute the mentality had responded more to sounds belonging to better remembered objects. \"We propose that sound cues presented during rest prompted preferential processing of corresponding object-location associations,\" the researchers said.

For sceptics who conceive the results may hit nothing to do with sleep, the researchers repeated the noise cueing exercise with twelve participants who remained awake. In their case, sounds presented after learning made no difference to subsequent module performance.

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Rudoy, J., Voss, J., Westerberg, C., & Paller, K. (2009). Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating Them During Sleep. Science, 326 (5956), 1079-1079 DOI:

People think that money affects happiness more than it really does

With dogged determination we lie, rob, borrow, adventure and sometimes work too, in the hope of boosting our income. So zealous is our pursuit of money, it's as if we think it will someways make us happier. Strangely enough, whilst psychologists and economists have conducted numerous studies display that the relation between income and healthiness is weak, only digit preceding study has asked what place grouping rattling believe about money and healthiness (and this was focused on middle-income, working women). It's into this empirical desert that Lara Aknin and colleagues arrive with a survey of hundreds of North Americans of mixed age, sexuality and wealth. Aknin's team have found that grouping do indeed appraisal the unification between money and happiness, especially at lower levels of income.

The study worked by asking grouping what their own income and healthiness levels were and then asking them to judge the healthiness of grouping on lower or higher incomes than themselves. The participants' estimates of the healthiness of grouping on high incomes was largely accurate, but they massively underestimated the healthiness of grouping on lower incomes. The picture was the same in a second study that asked grouping to judge how happy they'd be if they earned more or inferior than they rattling did.

More detailed analysis showed that grouping on higher incomes were more probable to appraisal the relation between money and happiness, perhaps because they had more to fear from losing the ability to maintain their underway standard of living.

\"We demonstrate that grown Americans erroneously believe that earning inferior than the median household income is associated with severely diminished happiness,\" the researchers said. \"[This is] a false belief that may advance some grouping to chase opportunities for accumulated wealth or forgo a reduction in income for accumulated free time.\"

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Aknin, L., Norton, M., & Dunn, E. (2009). From wealth to well-being? Money matters, but less than people think The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4 (6), 523-527 DOI:

When a police line-up with six one-eyed men is better than a line-up with none

You're mugged by a man with a patch over digit eye. You exposit him and his characteristic attendance to the police. They post a one-eyed suspect and inform him to you in a video line-up with five clear \"foils\". If this suspect is the only person in the line-up with digit eye, prior research shows you're highly probable to pick him discover modify if, in every another respects, he actually bears little resemblance to your mugger. So the challenge is: How to make police line-ups fairer for suspects who have an extraordinary characteristic feature?

Police in the army and UK currently ingest two strategies - digit is to conceal the suspect's characteristic feature (and tell the attestator they've done so); the another is to ingest make-up, theatrical props or Photoshop to grace the another members of the line-up with the aforementioned characteristic feature. Now Theodora Zarkadi and her colleagues have compared both approaches and institute the fairer method is to flex the extraordinary feature.

Zarkadi's aggroup presented 110 undergrads with 32 photos of real-life inmates condemned from the Florida Department of Corrections website. Photoshop was used to apply characteristic features including tattoos and piercings. Six of these characteristic \"suspect\" offenders were then embedded, digit each, in sextet picture line-ups alongside five previously unseen \"innocent\" offenders. The participants' task was to pick discover the suspect in each line-up.

The key finding is that the students made significantly more correct identifications when the innocents had been presented an identical characteristic feature compared with when the suspects' extraordinary feature had been unseeable (approx 58 per cent quality vs. most 39 per cent).

This plus was replicated in a second research in which the suspect was sometimes absent from the line-ups (akin to what can happen in actual life). In this case, when the suspect was present, identification was again more accurate when the innocents also appeared with the aforementioned characteristic feature (approx 50 per cent vs. 30 per cent). When the suspect was missing from the line-up (i.e. sextet innocents appeared), the students made simulated identifications on most 60 per cent of occasions, but this figure wasn't affected by whether the suspect, when present, had his extraordinary feature hidden, or if instead his feature was replicated in the innocents.

\"Police officers should be alive of this ... falsifiable result when constructing line-ups for suspects with characteristic features and should flex rather than conceal these features,\" the researchers said.

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Zarkadi T, Wade KA, & Stewart N (2009). Creating Fair Lineups for Suspects With Distinctive Features. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS PMID.