Hot MedFax

Who's the most powerful person in your world?  Your boss?  Your spouse?  Your mother? If you picked any one of these, relax.  When powerful people are faced with ambiguous circumstances, they're often at a loss, according to newswise.com.  Faced with ambivalence, powerful people are less decisive. Say what?  The web site reports that, although powerful people often tend to decide and act quickly, they become more indecisive than others when the decisions are toughest to make, a new study suggests, suggests a new study   published in Psychological Science , a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Researchers found that when people who feel powerful also feel ambivalent about a decision – torn between two equally good or bad choices – they actually have a harder time taking action than people who feel less powerful. That’s different than when powerful people are confronted by a simpler decision in which most evidenc...

I remember, years ago, seeing a man expose himself on a busy main street while I was out running.  I immediately went to the police station and was asked to look through a notebook of potential suspects. I saw someone immediately who looked like the man, but we had seen a movie recently with a villain who (oddly enough) looked very similar.  Figuring that couldn't be the right man, I said I couldn't pick him out of the faces.  The cop pointed to the exact same picture and said, "Is that him?" Now, if I were a witness on the stand who was asked the same question, a trial might have gone very differently.  (I never heard back, but clearly, he was a frequent flier!) Turns out that many decisions we make are often influenced by our memories and the confidence we have in them.  (Don't get me started on False Memory Syndrome, that awful -- and false -- idea put forward by groups in the '90s trying to deny sexual abuse memories that surface later in life.) B...