Posts by Neil Petersen

Honestly, I tend to tune out when people talk about the power of positive thinking. The idea that being optimistic can solve all your problems never really rang true to me. Surely it should go in the other direction, that you become more optimistic by solving your problems, no? Still, one of the lessons life…

People are switching jobs more than ever before. An analysis published by LinkedIn this week found that job-hopping has almost doubled in the last two decades. Chalk it up to a changing economy, or maybe just another problem with millennials. But a new study suggests that job hopping might also have a genetic component. To…

Rejection is a part of life, but it’s a part of life that isn’t particularly fun. Because we’re social animals, we respond to rejection in a predictable way: we feel bad. But it turns out we can respond to rejection in unpredictable ways too. Researchers study reactions to rejection by getting together a bunch of…

No mount of money is a substitute for happiness, or so the traditional wisdom goes. And science has tended to suggest that the traditional wisdom is right – that is, until a team of researchers from Cambridge came along this year and published a study suggesting that money can buy happiness if you spend it…

School is more than just a place for learning academic subjects. It’s also where students mature as people and figure out how to be part of society. Kids take the more general lessons they learn in school out into the rest of their lives. Because students spend such a big portion of their lives in…

In my last post, I wrote that people who’re primed to think about free will tend to make riskier decisions. This is true, but like many things in psychology, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds at first. The problem is that “risky decisions” aren’t a tangible thing that’s easy to quantify. When I…

One of the things we can learn from psychology is that a lot of different factors outside our control influence our behavior. And one of those factors itself is whether we believe factors outside our control are influencing our behavior. That’s a little circular, so let me put it in less confusing terms: what decisions…

Last week I wrote about a study on what happy people tweet. But there’s some research out that looks at another question: what do happy people eat? I always just assumed there must be a strong positive relationship between number of Oreos consumed and overall happiness, but it turns out I was wrong. What the…

Every year millions of people fill out brackets predicting the results of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. This year, Syracuse is the big surprise so far – less than one percent of all brackets submitted to the NCAA’s Bracket Challenge had Syracuse surviving into the Final Four. This unpredictability is what makes the whole…

I’ve been following the US presidential primary elections pretty closely lately, and I woke up this morning thinking I should research an article about lying and deception for AllPsych. Funny how that happened. Politicians aren’t the only people who lie, of course – they’re just the ones who’re best at doing it with a straight…