Psychology
With the holiday season at a fever pitch and charitable giving on people's minds, new research from the University of Delaware suggests that for organizations interested in increasing the number of givers and the amount of donations, the solution might be as easy as a simple change in how charitable gifts are made.
For the past three years, as part of their course requirements, 190 of Kent Messer's undergraduate students have attended a guest lecture presented by Kate Hackett, executive director of Delaware Wild Lands (DWL).
Following the lecture, Messer, the Unidel Howard Cosgrove Chair for…
A rising trend in narcissism is good news for retailing and manufacturing firms offering customizable products, say marketing and psychology scholars in the Journal of Retailing. They say firms can increase the uniqueness of self-designed products by examining consumers' narcissistic behavior.
The authors say there is a narcissism epidemic. They believe narcissism has increased 30 percent between 1979 and 2006 and is likely to continue with the rise of social media and self-promoting trends. Data show narcissists rate customizable and personalizable products more favorably and are…
A study of a million UK women has shown that happiness has no direct effect on mortality nor does unhappiness and stress directly cause ill health.
Studies that claim it had simply confused cause and effect.
Life-threatening poor health can cause unhappiness, and so unhappiness is associated with increased mortality but that is more confirmation bias than neutral analysis. Smokers also tend to be unhappier than non-smokers but accounting for previous ill health, smoking, and other lifestyle and socio-economic factors, the investigators found that unhappiness itself was no longer…
Hank |
An old legal joke goes that a man accused of lifting wallets is arrested brought into court. The judge asked if he wants a trial by judge or a jury of his peers. The accused replies, "You judge, I don't want 12 pickpockets deciding what happens to me."
It is a common psychological tendency to assume most people are 'like' us, that is why rationalization about behavior occurs so easily - everyone else is doing it. So what do we make of it when a journalist repeatedly claims that everyone else is a shill for corporate interests?
The obvious: That the journalist sees it everywhere because she…
Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnoses seemed to be a relic of the 1990s, and it was believed impatient teachers, helicopter parents and the pediatricians that enable them had moved onto other things.
Not so, instead 12 percent of U.S. children and teens had an ADHD diagnosis in 2011, up 43 percent since 2003, The analysis by Sean D. Cleary, PhD, MPH, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at George Washington University suggests that 5.8 million U.S. children ages 5 to 17 now have this diagnosis.
Children with ADHD may have trouble with paying…
'Delay discounting' is the tendency, given the choice, to take a smaller reward that is available immediately, instead of a larger reward that will be delivered in the future - and that is a trait that can be inherited.
Yes, your impulsive nature can be blamed on your parents, according to a report presented today at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology annual meeting. If you need an excuse for spending too much on things you don't need, just say your delay discounting is in your genetic makeup.
In a study of 602 twins, Dr. Andrey Anokhin and colleagues at Washington…
A team of psychologists say MIT linguist Noam Chomsky's discredited belief that we possess an "internal grammar" that allows us to comprehend even nonsensical phrases holds up.
A paper in Nature Neuroscience endorses Chomsky's 1957 work, Syntactic Structures (1957), which posited that we can recognize a phrase such as "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as both nonsensical and grammatically correct because we have an abstract knowledge base that allows us to make such distinctions even though the statistical relations between words are non-existent. Neuroscientists and psychologists…
There have been recent high-profile claims suggesting genetics and neuroscience are set to radically change the way we think about crime and punishment. Author Sam Harris, for example, argues that recent discoveries in neuroscience undermine our notion of free will, while Adrian Raine states there is a “biological basis also to recidivistic violent offending”.
But are our notions of blame and responsibility really heading for a revolution?
To answer that, it’s necessary to understand a bit about how the law works today. Legal guilt typically requires more than just a physical act. It usually…
The difference between mild sexual difficulties and diagnosable sexual dysfunction is an ongoing debate among health professionals, but it has been stirred up recently by changes to diagnostic criteria. Unlike science and medicine, psychology still uses symptom-based diagnosis, and the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is vague because it specifies symptoms lasting at least 6 months, occurring almost always in sexual encounters, and causing distress in order to be considered a sexual dysfunction.
Some worry that these criteria will…
We often read others’ intentions in what they do - if we disagree with someone's science, for example, we assume they are shills for money, but if we like their results, they are beacons of truth.
But it's more overt than assuming Bernie Sanders is ethical and Donald Trump cannot be, even when someone does something positive we are slower to give them credit - but usually quick to assign blame.
Take this scenario commonly used in philosophy:
The CEO knew the plan would harm the environment, but he did not care at all about the effect the plan would have on the environment. He started the plan…