Psychology
On October 5th, Steve Jobs died. At first I was surprised at how choked up I got at his death—it’s not like I ever met him—until I realized that I wasn’t the only one. From special issues of The New Yorker and Wired magazines, to spontaneous memorials of flowers and candles at Apple stores, and front page articles everywhere, it seems that the world has taken a moment to mourn the loss of Jobs. The outpouring of sorrow and grief, in the era of Occupy Wall Street, may seem astonishing. Steve Jobs was, after all, a cantankerous stranger who ran a corporation, at a time when little love is lost…
Hank |
Abortion is not a contentious issue in America these days - campaign platforms primarily center on differences in taxation and the scope of government but, for the most part, abortion for the left and the 2nd Amendment for the right are really only invoked to whip the fringes into a frenzy.
In California, where I live, it may seem a little different, both Senator Barbara Boxer and Rep. Nancy Pelosi campaign heavily on a platform that if they are not reelected women will be dying in back alley abortions (which tells you California has a lot of people on the fringes who believe one Republican…
There may be a sexual upside to an economic downside; more sex. Maybe 'stimulus plan' means different things to different people.
Omri Gillath at the University of Kansas says men are likely to pursue short-term mating strategies when faced with a threatening environment, according to sexual selection theory based on evolutionary psychology. How did he determine that? He and colleagues told men to think about their own deaths, which mimics conditions of 'low survivability' and they found that men responded more vigorously to sexual pictures and had increased heart rates when…
Watching almost any episode of FX's Sons of Anarchy, you can’t help but notice that Jax, the young biker protagonist, is a bit of a stud. There's always some vixen falling for his patched, faded, hairy, tattooed charms. He’s handsome, but not wealthy or powerful, and he's a criminal and murderer who would, in real life, probably spend years behind bars. Hard to imagine him as the ideal mate.
Yet as we've all heard by now, high-testosterone males (like Jax) are attractive to a woman as genetic fathers, not as co-parents who help raise children and act as partners. High-T males are the…
Social projection, where we believe that others agree with us, helps us validate our beliefs. Psychologists say that we tend to believe people who are similar to us in an important way, religion or lifestyle, will act as we do and even vote as we do.
And we exaggerate differences between ourselves and those who are explicitly unlike us, another form of rationalization.
But what about people whose affiliation is unknown and who can't easily be placed in either the "in-group" or the "out-group"?
We default to thinking those silent, unknown people are on our side also, says a survey…
The fury of Hurricane Irene was out-categorized by a second hurricane that occurred at the same time: the media windstorm covering the event — a newspaper and broadcast blitz pummeling the public sphere with the unrelenting force of a tsunami.
Predictably,the criticism that followed the media’s doomsday weather frenzy was in itself out of proportion. For example, media critic Howard Kurtz wrote:
Someone has to say it: cable news was utterly swept away by the notion that Irene would turn out to be Armageddon. National news organizations morphed into local eyewitness-news operations, going…
Hank |
I don't like SpongeBob SquarePants. I generally regard any parent who does like SpongeBob SquarePants with suspicion and derision; they probably watch "Real Housewives of Fresno" or whatever city that show is down to now.
So when I see an article claiming SpongeBob is bad for kids and I may have a reason to ban that porifera from the house, it has a certain truthiness to it and so I let my confirmation bias run free.
But is it good science? It seems obvious that a lot of television for very young kids is a bad idea - I can't prove it, no one can, and certainly no one can…
Hank |
A group of people are joining together for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center to discover whether their 'collective intention' can bring peace to the world.
What does that even mean? The 9/11 Intention Experiment is the latest of 23 Web-based experiments carried out by author Lynne McTaggart to try and test the power of thought to change the physical world.
Yes, you read that right - telekinesis. Or mind control. I'm not sure. She doesn't look like that lady in "V" but it sounds like kind of the same approach - make the…
Hank |
Can we get three cheers for psychology? The bulk of the quality researchers in the field have consistently been under fire because of researchers like Satoshi Kanazawa and Marc Hauser but have started taking their discipline back.
Circling the wagons around researchers was never a good idea but, well, things happen and psychologists are people too. Yet over the last year they have begun clearing out the ranks and now Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel, who runs the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research, has been sacked.
You won't find a lot of articles…
Breast-feeding mothers are far more likely to demonstrate a 'mama bear' effect', aggressively protecting their infants and themselves , than women who bottle-feed their babies or who are non-mothers, says a new study in Psychological Science.
To help mama bear out, breast-feeding mothers register lower blood pressure than other women when behaving aggressively - the researchers say suggests breast-feeding helps dampen the body’s stress response to fear; breast-feeding mothers are more likely to be courageous.
The breast-feeding mothers’ reaction is known as “lactation aggression” or “maternal…