Psychology

I just noticed a study from a few months back that correlated male shopping habits to ... evolution.   Yes, the necessary survival skills that women used for foraging and men used to hunt evolved into the inability of men to match socks and the reason women can't find the escalator in the shopping mall if you give them directions. So if you are disinclined to believe, as friend-of-Obama Larry Summers does, that women cannot do math, you militant anti-science types will really dislike knowing that women are intrinsically obligated to spend the day picking through racks of clothes with…

Think you're rational? Think again. Here's but one example, gentle reader, of your brain unbound by reason. Blue Devil basketball tickets are a hot commodity: there are far more fans than seats. And so some students enter a ticket lottery. After one of these lotteries, Duke researchers posing as ticket scalpers found that students who lost the raffle were willing to pay $170 for a seat, while students who won tickets would only sell their seats for an average of $2,400. This shucks common economic theory: the same seat for the same game should have a set price. Why would students on either…

Kathleen and I have been spending a fair shake of our time looking through the interwebz at the whole Judge Rotenberg Center issue. There are hundreds of pages of materials to go through, and heck there's 115 pages just from Israel's response to the UN outcry and Nightline report. For Israel's take on the history of the center, you can read his interesting article at his site. Israel writes: "In this respect, JRC is like a medical hospital. The goal of most medical hospitals is to return the individual to good health and to a normal living situation outside the hospital; however, in…

Lest you think that the AoAers have a hold on promoting woo or, just as bad, think that the mainstream media had potentially wised up (Kudos, Tsouderos!), a local reporter in Annapolis has an article up on the miracles of Facilitated Communication (FC) and how families in the area will now be able to use FC with their nonverbal autistic children (and it appears, potentially have the state government pay for it?). Never mind that facilitated communication has been thoroughly debunked. Never mind that it is in its own way a horrible abuse of  disabled people, to co-opt their…

It's a common phrase; money can't buy happiness.   But a worldwide survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that included questions about happiness and income revealed that life satisfaction certainly does rise with income, though it seems to depend on how you define happiness because positive feelings don't necessarily follow, the researchers report.   It may be a fundamental part of the human condition that few are content, no matter what they have.  The findings, from an analysis of data gathered in the first Gallup World Poll, appear this month in the Journal of…

Yesterday I posted the highly insightful and scientifically bullet proof (wink-wink, nod-nod) Robin Hood Morality Quiz—you shoulda ranked Robin, Maid Marion, Little John and the good sheriff of Nottingham from most-to-least moral. Check the chart below to see how disturbed you are. Percentages are of total respondents. •  RH, LJ, MM, SN: A moralist with conventional ideas. Old fashioned. 5% total. •  RH, LJ, SN, MM: Massively puritanical. Women conspire against men. 2% total. •  RH, MM, LJ, SN: Your philosophy is a confused mix of romanticism and moralism. 4% total.•  RH…

Religion, regardless of one’s personal religious or spiritual beliefs, matters. The chances of being part of a diverse religious affiliation increase as our global community expands. McFaul (2006) points out that while two out of every three people in the world belong to one of the three major religions of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, there are hundreds of religions in the world today. McFaul contends that “religion is one of the major driving forces of the future” (p. 31). Christopher Hitchens and others in the atheist world might like to rail about god’s lack of existence and the…

Read the following story and then rank Robin, Maid Marion, the sheriff of Nottingham and Little John from most to least moral (I'll post interpretation instructions tomorrow): The sheriff of Nottingham has finally caught Robin Hood and Little John! Instead of killing them immediately, he makes the mistake of all storybook villains in simply stashing them in the dungeon. Despite their track record of heroics, there the two benevolent outlaws rot--until Maid Marion shows up pleading her love for Robin and begging for his release. Sure, says the sheriff, if Marion will sleep with him. She does…

One thing the film industry get right - and they don't get much right, since romantic comedy behavior in real life is likely to get you a restraining order - is that music evokes moods. French researchers (naturally) say they have determined that if you want to successfully ask a woman on a date, the right soundtrack could improve the odds. They found women were more prepared to give their number to an ‘average’ young man after listening to romantic background music. No question media affect our behavior and the only people who disagree with the science behind that are involved in the…

The terms we use, how we define them, are important things. Often times, we use similar terminology interchangeably. We're discussing nebulously defined disorders (autism and intellectual disability) that change over time and depending on the criteria being used. What do I mean about interchangeability and criteria? The official umbrella in the DSM-IV is not autism spectrum disorders, but is instead pervasive developmental disorders. However, the NIH uses autism spectrum disorders, as do many people in the autism community. The clinical and research usages change faster than…