Anthropology
A new survey analysis finds that in just about about any field where there are academics and field work, there is going to be sexual harassment and even assault.
Yes, surveys, the bane of the scientific method. The authors analyzed survey results of 666 people (142 men, 516 women) with field experience in anthropology, archeology and more, and found that many respondents claimed to have suffered or witnessed sexual harassment or even sexual assault while at work in the field.
A majority of the survey respondents (64 percent) said they had experienced sexual harassment (inappropriate sexual…
A recent article by Nury Vittachi, Scientists discover that atheists might not exist, and that’s not a joke, received rather a lot of comments. Among these were a few about the place of women in the world: however these tended to be lost among the welter of other comments. Indeed, the article seemed to attract a large number of orcs. Now in some ways I am a highly discriminatory sort of person, and here I am discriminating between trolls, who simply like to post on threads to wind people up, giving vent to their mischievous nature, and orcs, who attack in force against those…
Social animals often develop relationships with other group members to reduce aggression and gain access to scarce resources. In wild chacma baboons the strategy for grooming activities shows a certain pattern across the day - they have ulterior motives.
Grooming between individuals in a group of baboons has significance. To be groomed has hygienic benefits and is stress relieving for the individual, while grooming another individual can provide access to infants, mating opportunities and high quality food by means of tolerance at a patch.
This can be used in a strategic manner by…
Sociology is too uncontrolled to be meaningful science but controlled scenarios don't lead to realistic behavior.
The Virtual Environment Navigation lab at Brown University thinks they can bridge the gap between them.
They have developed a wireless virtual reality system to study a phenomenon that scientists don't yet understand: how pedestrians interact with each other and how those individual behaviors, in turn, generate patterns of crowd movement. It's an everyday experience for all kinds of animals everything from people to ants.
"When you walk across campus during class…
When did teen dating get so violent? It used to be the kind of thing that was a plot linchpin for movies but now estimates are that 1 in 6 young people report acts like punching, pulling hair, shoving, and throwing things.
The good news for equality is that both genders do it, they are aggressors and victims - and sometimes both.
Do you believe it? Surveys are difficult at best and surveys of teenagers are more prone to inconsistency so calibrate accordingly, but the University of Michigan Medical School used surveys of just over 4,000 adolescent patients ages 14 to 20 seeking emergency…
If you call yourself a paleo diet aficionado, you probably eat a lot of bugs. As many as you can. Because finding enough food was the kind of struggle only dinosaurs can sympathize with - an ant diet is a struggle.
Our bodies were smaller, and so were our brains. But our brains, and the higher-level cognitive functions that came with them, grew in order to stop eating insects. In order to get more food, our brains stopped eating natural and set out to optimize the world around us, according to a five-year study of capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica, the research provides support for an…
Chimpanzees are copycats but sometimes it is more than copying, it becomes new traditions particular to only one specific group of these primates, according to a paper in Animal Cognition.
In 2010,
Edwin van Leeuwen of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in The Netherlands
noticed how a female chimp named Julie repeatedly put a stiff, strawlike blade of grass for no apparent reason in one or both of her ears. She left it there even when she was grooming, playing or resting in Zambia's Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust sanctuary. On subsequent visits, van Leeuwen saw…
In business, the saying goes there are good decisions, bad decisions and no decisions, and they are in that order of being problematic. This lacks common sense to some; how can doing the wrong thing be better than doing no thing? Companies who don't try and fail are not trying enough, that's why.
Most people would rather do something than nothing. Disney theme parks know this. You may may be in line for an hour but you are always moving. And then psychologists say we're just not comfortable in our own heads. Most people will do something, even the wrong thing, they write in Science.
In a…
How bad is western music? Chimps in a study published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition preferred silence - yet they liked music from Africa.
And music from India. What is the reason for that?
Music in the east is structured differently, notation is everything from Swara Kalana to Chôngganbo, but African music is not all that different. Why would chimps like it more? It may be tempo. The current findings say this may be the first to show that they display a preference for particular rhythmic patterns. If the authors aren't sure, none of the rest of the…
Promiscuity means different things in different cultures, a one-size-fits-all approach rarely fits anyone, which is why western protesters do so poorly telling Africans how they need to change their behavioral ways.
And in western society, female promiscuity is frowned on more than the male kind. Even in different countries it has different perceptions. The British show "Coupling" was hilarious to both Americans and British people but when a US network made an American version, it was a huge flop, even though it was taken almost verbatim from the British. The reason is because American…