Progress-focused

What do we value more in other people's performance: hard work or talent? And what does it matter what the answer is to this question? The naturalness bias in music appreciation Researchers Tsay & Banaji (2011) found evidence for a naturalness bias which is the tendency to prefer supposed 'naturals' over 'strivers'. Even though expert musicians stated that they found hard work more important than talent they implicitly preferred talent over hard work. Tsay and Banaji demonstrated this by presenting more than 100 professionally trained musicians with two profiles of two professional musicians, and a sample musical clip to listen to from each musician.

Have you noticed the paradox that sometimes people who are vocal opponents of gay rights at some point turn out to be gay themselves? Did you hear that the person responsible for the mass shooting at a gay club earlier this week had been a regular visitor of that club and chatted with men via online dating services like Grindr? How to make sense of this paradox?

Our beliefs about ourselves can have a strong impact on how we behave and on how we develop and flourish. We are not always aware of our self-beliefs. There are what we call implicit self-beliefs. An example of such an implicit self-belief might be: "I am not a math person." Researchers Cvencek et al. (2015) of the University of Washington found, in a study with 299 Singaporean elementary-school students that children of this age often already have such implicit beliefs about whether they are or aren't 'math people'.