Psychology
When the Australian federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef in August, she told waiting reporters on the shore that she’d seen “amazing wildlife, fish, turtles, clams … a reef teeming with life”.
Such an upbeat assessment seems at odds with the Scientific Consensus Statement, released by the Queensland government in 2017, which said “key Great Barrier Reef ecosystems continue to be in poor condition”.
Of course, no one doubts what Ley saw – but the contrast between what we can directly experience and what scientists tell us is the bigger picture is…
Hank |
Environmental Working Group, the trial lawyer organization that claims modern pesticides are killing us but the old kinds labeled as "Organic"(™) create healthier families, has a new conspiracy tale out, this time that a "chemical cocktail" in plain old drinking water is causing 100,000 cases of cancer per year.
While USA Today (they'll blame Trump) and New York Times (they'll blame scientists) are sure to cover it, you don't need to be concerned. Like everything EWG does, this is manufactured hype.
They may have fabricated a new chemical scaremongering analytical framework to test the…
In recent Pew Survey data, 75 percent of moderate Democrats believe global climate change is a major threat to the well-being of the United States while 94 percent of Democrats who skew farther left believe that, up 30 percent from 2013.
Overall, more Americans feel that way, 57 percent this year versus 40 percent in 2013, but that increase is almost all on the left. Among the right, Republicans and people who vote Republican, that belief was 27 percent in 2019, up from 22 percent in 2013.
This has translated into beliefs on policy. In 2015, 34 percent of Americans said Congress and the…
Scholars from from Boston University School of Medicine), National Center for PTSD at VA Boston Healthcare System and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have used statistical correlation to conclude that individuals with greater optimism are more likely to live longer, age 85 or older.
Obviously a lot of things go into a long life but the authors feel like they are early in positing that positive psychosocial factors promote healthy aging.
Like all epidemiology, this is only correlation and simply exploratory. Don't begin to worry if you are not as happy as people on Facebook…
Members of the United States military who are injuried abroad often return to the U.S. for treatment and must be transported by aeromedical evacuation between medical facilities.
Evacuations can lead to their own chronic and acute stress, on top of the injuries and potential psychological trauma.
While much is known about the benefits of animal-assisted interventions in a variety of health care settings, there is limited evidence of the biological and psychosocial effects of animal-assisted interventions in the military population, particularly in an aeromedical staging facility…
Hank |
An influential psychological theory, borne out in hundreds of experiments, may have been debunked, writes Daniel Engber, and then "how can so many scientists have been so wrong?"
It sounds like a clarion call for concern about the scientific method. Yet it isn't. Instead, it was something that was rather predictable to anyone who knows how most modern (post-1960s) psychology experiments are conducted - and that in most cases they never are conducted, at least not in the way people who took science in school understand experiments.
There are many reasons why public understanding (and…
Hank |
If you are a soldier, you may believe the worst thing that can happen is being shot. There is no upside to it, you are wounded or die.
A new psychology paper says soldiers who've actually been shot are not as traumatized as other soldiers who either saw it or heard about it. They contend that soldiers who experience suffering and death without being in any danger report more post-traumatic stress symptoms than soldiers who were actually in life-threatening situations.
If this is accurate and not just taking anecdotes as science, the paper in the European Journal of…
Hank |
A new survey took a premise that is casually accepted by the university sector - that conservatives' trust in science has eroded - and goes beyond the usual claim that trust has eroded because American conservatives are less scientific.
Trust in science has eroded among conservatives...but it has also eroded among progressives. Only a narrow band of self-identifying liberals maintains the same level of confidence in science as they did 40 years ago. And 40 years ago conservatives had the most trust of all.(1)
Not so today. While the humanities had been co-opted by political liberalism…
Hank |
With two recent mass homicides, one by someone who endorsed "white supremacist" views and one that supported "Antifa" violence, the search is on for commonality between two people in opposition to each other in many ways. One commonality is skin color but there is no biological hypothesis for how melanin might increase violence. There certainly are not a lot of women doing these shootings so the chromosome correlation is one of the questions that needs to be asked.
However, a history of mental illness is common in almost all cases of mass violence.
Given that, it may seem like that is…
Rich Or Poor, Scammers Don't Cheat Because They Need The Money — They Cheat Because They're Cheaters
Why do people cheat?
When we hear that a poor person scammed others out of money, we may attribute this behavior to their poverty, rationalizing that the person violated ethics and the law because they needed the money.
But the rich and powerful also cheat: falsifying loan applications, evading taxes, and running Ponzi schemes that defraud investors of millions.
As a behavioral economist, I am fascinated by how money affects decision-making. If money were the driving factor behind cheating, for example, it wouldn’t really make sense for wealthy people to break the law for financial gain.…