The New Yorker carries two features this week with some great anecdotes illustrating how current psychology views the role of effort and free will. I’ve thrown in a link to my new favorite science publication, Seed Magazine, which combines top notch science feature-writing with an impressive breadth of cultural awareness. They also have an impeccable design department headed by Ben Fry, who wrote the textbooks to a visualization class I took. 

bweisner on flickr

Malcolm Gladwell describes a computer-engineer-turned-little-league-basketball-coach who takes his daughter’s team to victory in the junior nationals simply by using a continuous full-court press. It’s a deadly effective strategy, but also “socially horrifying.” The article explores other examples where simply “putting in a lot of effort” is met with resistance by our culture at large.

Jonah Lehrer writes about a psychology study that found that children who are able to suppress their craving for candy for a future reward end up being more successful later on in life. While this isn’t terribly surprising, the underlying psychological explanation–metacognition, or the awareness of your own thought processes–is intriguing. Is highly developed metacognition a genetic trait, or can it be cultivated? You can probably guess which answer is most appealing to the readers of the New Yorker.

Seed Magazine features the “eusocial” insects–ants, bees, and wasps–to illuminate an age-old puzzle in evolutionary theory: how does altruism evolve? Why is it that most hive members become sterile workers, slaving away while unable to pass their genes on to the next generation? One idea is that workers are still helping out their own genes since they are related to the queen (who does have offspring). However, some species have “selfless” social roles even when hive members aren’t closely related.