2 . Recently, after I gave a virtual presentation on my book Indistractable, a listener wrote something in the Zoom chat that drove me crazy, “This is great but wouldn’t work for me. I’m a Gemini (双子星座的人).”

Ironically, the Zoom listener is right. If she thinks she’s incapable, she’ll prove it correct — whether it has anything to do with the stars and moon or not. Her inflexible self-identification denies her the chance to improve her life. It’s incredibly self-limiting.

That’s why we should stop defining ourselves as fixed identities and nouns, and instead start describing ourselves using verbs.

Words are powerful. Linguistic research shows that language shapes people and culture; it can also give us insight into ourselves and our behavior. In a well-known study, researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen had all students in the same elementary school take a standard IQ test. Then they randomly selected a group of students, regardless of their test results, and told teachers the group would show “dramatic intellectual growth”. Eight months later, those students scored significantly higher on an IQ test. The study concluded that teachers’ positive perception of students correlated to those students’ high performance on intellectual and academic tests. The labels the children received became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy (预言).

That’s because language shapes expectations, which shape our reality. If we have experiences that lead us to label ourselves with specific nouns during our life, then we are likely to stick with those labels and the behaviors that go with them.

Using verbs to identify ourselves is an effective method for releasing “trapped priors”—a term in psychology for a perception of reality that’s affected or trapped by past experiences. Verbs are action words well suited to describing short-lived behaviors that can and do change. They don’t lay claim to our entire identity, but they acknowledge that we are people first and foremost, not whatever a singular noun may say we are. So, instead of saying, “I am a procrastinator (拖拉者)”, you should say, “I am a person who often procrastinates.”

By focusing on our behaviors, not fixed characteristics, we can release harmful perceptions of ourselves that hold us back from trying methods that might improve our lives — like those that can help us achieve the critical skill of being indistractable.

4 . A new study by a team of researchers shows that searching to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing misinformation, not the opposite.

The reason for this outcome may be explained by search-engine outputs in the study. The researchers found that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.

“This points to the danger that ‘data voids’ — areas of the information ecosystem that are dominated by low quality, or even outright false, news and information — may be playing a resulting role in the online search process, leading to low return of credible information or, more alarming, the appearance of non-credible information at the top of search results,” observes lead author Kevin Aslett, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida.

To study the impact, they recruited participants through both Qualtrics and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for a series of five experiments and with the aim of measuring the impact of a common behavior: searching online to evaluate news (SOTEN).

The first four studies tested the following aspects of online search behavior and impact:

◎ The effect of SOTEN on belief in both false or misleading and true news directly within two days an article’s publication

◎ Whether the effect of SOTEN can change an individual’s evaluation after they had already assessed the truthfulness of a news story

◎ The effect of SOTEN months after publication

◎ The effect of SOTEN on recent news about a key topic with significant news coverage

A fifth study combined a survey with web-tracking data in order to identify the effect of exposure to both low- and high-quality search-engine results on belief in misinformation.

Across the five studies, the authors found that the act of searching online to evaluate news led to a statistically significant increase in belief in misinformation. This occurred whether it was shortly after the publication of misinformation or months later. This finding suggests that the passage of time does not lessen the impact of SOTEN on increasing the likelihood of believing false news stories to be true. Moreover, the fifth study showed that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.

“The findings highlight the need for media literacy programs to ground recommendations in search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified by this research,” concludes Joshua A Tucker, professor of politics.

6 . Even before Molly Johnson-Jones graduated from Oxford University in 2015, she felt professional pressure to land a “prestigious (享有声望的)” job in a high-powered industry. She says she and her university friends felt there were professions that carried prestige—particularly the fields of finance, medicine and law. That’s why Johnson-Jones ended up in investment banking for two years once she graduated, even though it didn’t feel like quite the right fit.

These kinds of “very traditional industries” have indeed carried prestige, says Jonah Stillman, co-founder of GenGuru, a firm that focuses on different generations in the workplace. As Gen Z joins the workforce, however, experts and younger workers say what’s considered a “prestigious” job may be expanding. Some younger workers do still report making money is prestigious, especially as cost of living shoots up; and working for certain firms or in specific industries can make a career. But many also place equal stress on other elements, such as values of the company, flexibility, and freedom from long, intense work hours.

And some data indicates that Gen Z are indeed turning to more meaningful work. April 2023 data from LinkedIn of more than 7,000 global workers shows 64% of Gen Zers in the UK, Germany and Ireland now consider it important to work for companies that share their values. The data also shows these young workers highlight work-life balance and career growth as top draws for potential workplaces.

This change in Gen Z’s attitude towards work may be in part because mechanisms (机制) behind finding jobs and seeing other possible career paths are changing, says Josh Graff, managing director of EMEA and LATAM at LinkedIn. With a greater number of jobs being posted online, “people have so much more access to information today than we did when we were applying for a job 20-plus years ago … This allows you to have much better visibility into a wealth of roles,” he says. “That change in the workplace, in the workforce … is leading people to understand there’s a wider range of options out there.”

8 . Socially, few things are more annoying than someone repeatedly checking their phone in the middle of your conversation with them. Soon enough, you’re having unhappy thoughts, thinking of their way like, I’m boring you; you’re more concerned with whoever’s on that phone than me; you don’t care about me. None of that is necessarily true, but this is: “If someone is engaged in a great conversation, they wouldn’t care about their phones,” says Leslie, a psychologist and researcher at NYU.

Do you sometimes wonder: What should I have said to a rude person like this? What if we have to talk to such maddening persons? Experts have advice about how to deal with this.

Whether you say something or not, remember that the cell-addict’s annoying habits aren’t about you. “It’s rude, for sure, but sometimes we mistake the behavior for more than what it is,” says Leslie. “It’s possible that they are facing something tough and merely experiencing nervousness or anxiety,” he adds. It’s also possible that their partner is stuck with a flat tyre (轮胎) or their kid is sick in hospital. The point is that you don’t know.

So before you become angry at the cell-addict’s open rudeness, focus instead on building a better conversation than whatever’s going down on Instagram. You might never be able to achieve this, given the power of today’s social media, so if you’re close enough to a person, Leslie advises you to directly ask them: “What’s on that thing that’s so interesting?” Chances are that they will apologise at once and quickly put the phone away. But if the answer is something real, talk about it. Better yet, you can avoid the situation in advance by saying something like, “I’m really interested in catching up properly, so how about we leave our phones in the car?” If they indeed have that flat tyre or sick kid, at least you won’t have to assume that it’s because your stories are boring.

Born in 1946 in New York, Claudia Goldin, professor at Harvard University,     1     (award) the Nobel Prize in economics for her work on women in the labor market in October, 2023. She found that women generally receive a     2     (low) pay than men. She looked at over 200 years of US data,     3     showed that much of the gender pay gap could     4     (historic) be explained by differences in education and jobs.

Female participation in the labor market follows     5     U-shaped form over the whole period, and the participation of     6     (marry) women decreased when society changed from farming to industry in the early 19th century, but then started to increase with the     7     (grow) of the service industry in the early 20th century, her research has shown.

“It is obvious that understanding women’s role in the labor market is important for society. Thanks to Goldin’s research, we are now equipped     8     a deeper understanding of the factors contributing to the gender pay gap     9     which challenges may need     10     (address) in the future,” Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, said in a statement.