Psychology

Writing balanced posts can be tricky, especially in relation to vaccines. Vaccines, like religions and politics, have become a hot-button topic in social discussions, and these three areas are absolutely polarized, definitely enter-at-your-own-risk sorts of discussions that can quickly turn to pissing matches. Ah, but they don't have to, I don't think, and not all disagreement is about that sort of thing. Plenty of people out there engage in inflammatory rhetoric that inflates the risks from vaccines; I think it's incredibly dangerous and I often counter it in my writings. Age of Autism…

Know why vegetarians are so angry?  They don't eat meat, it seems.  So this Thanksgiving, grab the turkey leg and tear off a hunk of flesh with your teeth and rationalize that evolutionary psychology thinks it made your cavemen ancestors nicer people. Frank Kachanoff , an undergraduate student in McGill University’s Department of Psychology, says that contrary to the image of athletes and carnivorous animals in the wild as hyper-aggressive,  meat appears to make human beings significantly less aggressive. “I was inspired by research on priming and aggression, that has shown…

MAFIA life used to be simple; whether you liked "Morte Alle Francia Italia Anela" or "Morte Alle Francese Italiani Avanti"(1)  they both meant kicking the snot out of the French, who had a pesky habit of causing trouble prior to Italian unification and weren't much better afterward. But then it became about money, and causing trouble for people in order to protect them from trouble they caused.  Eventually, the right people could not stay bought and the wronged people started to have enough so crackdowns by law enforcement occurred, to bloody effect. Result; mob life is even more…

Complexity, Morality and our Collective Economic Fate. I’ve been reading a lot of Paul Krugman lately, given the state of the economy and such. If you have been following him, you may have noticed one of his repeating refrains, “Economics is not a morality play.” To really understand what he is saying, you have to understand the evolution of human morality and how moral dictates play out in a complex system like the economy. We human beings have evolved a keen sense of moral accounting. It isn’t that hard to see how a highly cooperative species, such as ours, would’ve benefited from keeping…

Are you traumatized by terror flicks? Maybe more than you know. Scary  movies actually create a light version of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is what causes bad dreams and irrational fears of kids riding Big Wheels in hotel hallways (and, perhaps more rationally, of Jack Nicholson peeking through axe holes into your bathroom).  And by exploring how people stop these dreams and fears, researchers are learning how we might combat more serious PTSD. For instance, researchers find that talking about a horror movie afterward reduces the occurrence of bad dreams. But potentially…

If an isolated question asks you if you are more inclined to vote for one politician who lies about limiting his campaign financing or one who agrees to use only matching public funds in the interests of campaign finance reform and sticks to it, who would you pick?  Obviously if political campaigns were limited to that one topic, the honest politician would win - but quality leadership incorporates 'negative' personality traits too and President Barack Obama was able to spend double the money on advertising of his opponent because he used that strategy wisely.  A new study looks at…

A new study in rats says growing up with lots of sisters makes a male less sexy to females, because the sex ratio of a male rat's family while young influences his sexual behavior and therefore how female rats respond to him later.Early life obviously affects later behavior but how early and how much of an impact and how can it be quantified in a less 'soft' fashion.    There are correlation studies that even conclude the position of a fetus in the uterus matters and that a female fetus that spends the pregnancy sandwiched between two brothers grows up to be more masculine because…

I'm going to be honest here. I have a bone to pick with science. A week or so ago on Twitter, I tweeted this:Based on some of the responses I got, I decided to probe a little further. I wanted to see if I was in the minority in my opinion, or if others felt the same way. Apparently, I'm not alone. The way we approached science about 30 or 40 years ago is vastly different than how we do today. I'm not talking about the obvious differences due to technology, either. Indeed, with the advances we've made in technology, we have opportunities for rapid and monumental discovery more now than we…

It's a known aspect of the human condition that people tend to diminish the negative impact of something they do while recognizing the negative impact of things they don't do as common sense.   In Hollywood, director Rob Reiner thinks cigarettes should be censored from movies but has no problem with teenage sex in films.    Some blame junk food advertising for obesity but may think violence on TV has no impact. A new study in the the Oxford Journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience says that violent films, TV programs and video games desensitize teenagers to…

People will pay more for an iPhone, or any product, if it is owned by someone the consumer has 'positive' envy of, such as a friend or celebrity they like, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But it works the other way also; those with 'malicious' envy or contempt of someone who has a product would instead buy, for example, a BlackBerry instead of an iPhone.  The researchers say their discoveries about the motivations that result from different kinds of envy could be key to understanding marketing in the future. "Note that two types of envy exist: benign…