Progress-focused

As humans, we don't just think about what is happening in our lives here and now. We also have the ability to think about the past and the future. How we think about the events in our life has a lot like how we feel. Research has shown that self-distancing can help reflect on past negative events in our lives. Recent research looked at the effect of self-distancing when thinking about a feared future. 

Research from self-determination theory suggests that autonomy-support by educators, teachers and managers contributes to the well-being and functioning of children, students and staff. What about the effects of supporting your own autonomy? 

Researchers Orvell et al. (2020) further investigated the effects of self-distancing. They investigated whether distanced self-talk also works with intense emotions and vulnerable people. 

One of the well-known psychological interventions that is often used in education, among other things, is the so-called self-affirmation intervention. Binning et al. (2019) investigated the effects of self-affirmation exercises on student behavior in a longitudinal study. 

Distanced self-talk has positive effects on our self-control and wisdom. It also changes how we think about ourselves. This is shown by new research from Izzy Gainsburg and Ethan Kross. 

Igor Grossmann was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in Ukraine and Germany, and studied in Germany and the USA. Currently, he is the director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is one of the leading researchers in the field of wisdom research (view his Google Scholar profile ). His work focuses on demystifying wisdom and modeling of cultural change. He also co-hosts the On Wisdom Podcas t and initiated worldaftercovid.info . In this interview we will talk about topics like what wisdom is, why there now appears to be an ever-greater call for wisdom, how individuals may reason and act more wisely, and how wisdom may be taught. 

What is the role of ethics in leadership? Lee et al. (2019) conducted two studies (N = 92 and N = 195) in South Korea on how ethical leadership is related to employee performance and how it differs from some other leadership concepts.

Igor Grossmann has interviewed more than 50 prominent behavioral and social scientists from around the world to forecast the World after Covid , and share their advice on the wisdom people can use now to make it a better place. 

To what extent does intellectual humility contribute to learning new things? Could it be that intellectual humility makes you more likely to seek out new challenges, try harder and persevere in the face of adversity? Tenelle Porter and her colleagues investigated this. 

How is humble leadership related to the confidence of employees? A paper by Cho et al (2020) provides insight into this.

A study by Oc et al. (2019) looks at the relationship between the humility of managers and the authenticity of employees. Their finding: leaders' humility leads to followers' authenticity. Read more.

In a new book chapter, researchers Jayawickreme, Prentice & Fleeson (2020) describe preliminary evidence for morality as a basic psychological need . Below I will discuss some parts of this chapter. 

What does human nature look like? Are humans naturally good or bad? Are we selfish by nature or are we capable of purely selfless (altruistic) action? Are we mainly engaged in a constant battle with each other or is it more correct to say that we mainly work together and take care of each other? How we answer these kinds of questions for ourselves is quite important. Our answers to these questions determine to a large extent what we expect from ourselves and what we expect from others. And as a result, they also determine how we treat others and how we interpret behavior of others.

Psychology is mostly associated with domains such as child rearing, education and work. But the application of psychological knowledge can go further. We can look at our society and culture through a psychological perspective. 

A well-known psychological theory is the theory of planned behavior (TPB; Ajzen, 1991 , 2012 ). This theory helps to predict, understand and influence human behavior. Much research has shown the effectiveness of interventions based on the TPB (see, among others, Steinmetz et al., 2016 ).  However, a limitation of TPB is that it pays too little attention to the goals of individuals. In order to remove this limitation and thus broaden the applicability of the TPB, Ajzen & Kruglanski (2019) integrate the TPB with a theory about goals, the goal systems theory (GST) in a new article. 

We think we know that how we perceive reality is really what that reality is like. But research from about the last 50 years has shown in countless ways that our perception and reality are sometimes much less alike than we think.  How we subconsciously perceive reality in a distorted way has all kinds of consequences (often negative) for our choices and our social behavior. In this article I want to talk about a not so widely known bias: the illusion of transparency.

  A new study has come out about the liking gap in teams. Do team members like each other more than they realize? If so, what are the consequences? And can anything be done about it?

Max Roser, founder of Our World in Data , has written an article that I think everyone should read and share with others. The article states that the price of renewable energy sources has fallen spectacularly in the past ten years. He explains why this has happened and that we have a great opportunity to take a big step forward in the energy transition. Below is a summary of the article.

A new book has come out progress on the largest imaginable time scale. It's called The Precipice and it was written by Oxford-based Australian moral philosopher Toby Ord . The book states that we, as humanity, may only be at the beginning of our development. Humanity has existed for 200,000 years and there could be millions of future human generations. In the time we have had as humanity so far, we have made significant progress in improving the human condition, particularly in the last few hundred years. As humanity, we have collaborated with each other over time and distance.