Social factors of procrastination: group work can reduce procrastination among students

Social Psychology of Education - Research on procrastination covers a variety of individual factors (e.g., conscientiousness) and this focus is reflected in interventions against procrastination....     

Children’s prior experiences of their successes and failures modulate belief alignment

ABSTRACT

An ability to flexibly learn from others while at other times relying upon one’s own judgements is an important adaptive human capacity. The present research investigated how others’ epistemic states and prior experience of their own independent ability in a given task modulate young children’s selective learning. In particular, we asked whether 4-year-old children’s judgement concerning the location of a hidden object is modulated both by an informant’s knowledge states and by the absence/presence of a prior experience with a particular task. We found that the children were more likely to align their judgement according to the informant’s verbal report when the informant was knowledgeable than when she was ignorant – but only when they had explicitly experienced their own incapability to accurately guess an object’s location. The findings suggest that 4-year-old children are able to combine their own experience with others’ input to make their judgement.     

Inter-group alliance dynamics in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus)

Animal Cognition - The social intelligence hypothesis holds that complex social relationships are the major selective force underlying the evolution of large brain size and intelligence. Complex...