Sunday, November 25, 2018

Despite vast increases in the time and money spent on research, progress is barely keeping pace with the past. What went wrong?

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Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck. Patrick Collison, Michael Nielsen. The Atlantic, Nov 16, 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/scienc...

How does nature exposure make people healthier?: Evidence for the role of impulsivity and expanded space perception

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How does nature exposure make people healthier?: Evidence for the role of impulsivity and expanded space perception. Meredith A. Repke, Mere...

Sex workers sell information gleaned from their customers—specifically, corrupt police officers—to al-Shabaab; “If you want information here, you use the prostitutes and street kids"

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al-Shabaab’s Mata Hari Network. Katharine Petrich. War on the Rocks, Aug 14 2018. https://warontherocks.com/2018/08/al-shabaabs-mata-hari-ne...

Paperwork burdens, “sludge,” reduces access to important licenses, programs, & benefits; its defenses turn out to be more attractive in principle than in practice; a form of cost-benefit analysis is essential

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Sunstein, Cass R., Sludge and Ordeals (November 20, 2018). Duke Law Journal, Forthcoming. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3288192 Abstract:...

Choosing a meal to increase your appeal: How relationship status, sexual orientation, dining partner sex, and attractiveness impact nutritional choices in social dining scenarios

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Choosing a meal to increase your appeal: How relationship status, sexual orientation, dining partner sex, and attractiveness impact nutritio...

Social media as a source of political information do not reduce the compatibility of individual issue horizons: they are not caught in an 'echo chamber' or reduce issue diversity, top issue focus or issue overlap with others

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Stefan Geiß, Melanie Magin, Birgit Stark, Pascal Jürgens, „Common Meeting Ground” in Gefahr? Selektionslogiken politischer Informationsquell...

Sumatran orangutan mothers suppressed alarm calls up to 20 min until the model was out of sight in function of perceived danger for themselves & for an infant, suggesting high-order cognition

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Time-space–displaced responses in the orangutan vocal system. Adriano R. Lameira and Josep Call. Science Advances, Nov 14 2018, Vol. 4, no. ...
Saturday, November 24, 2018

Reward retroactively prioritizes memory for objects closest to the reward; there is a 24-hour delay & is stronger for mazes followed by a longer rest interval, suggesting a role for post-reward replay & overnight consolidation

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Retroactive and graded prioritization of memory by reward. Erin Kendall Braun, G. Elliott Wimmer & Daphna Shohamy. Nature Communications...

Ovulation, Sex Hormones, and Women’s Mating Psychology: No increase in preference for uncommited sex with men displaying putative fitness cues during the high-fertility phase of the menstrual cycle

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Jones, Benedict C., Amanda Hahn, and Lisa M. DeBruine. 2018. “Ovulation, Sex Hormones, and Women’s Mating Psychology.” PsyArXiv. November 24...

People evaluate their own voices as more attractive than the voices of others & that the self‐enhancement bias of voice attractiveness can be generalised to similar & familiar versions of self‐voice

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One's own and similar voices are more attractive than other voices. Zhikang Peng, Yanran Wang, Linghao Meng, Hongyan Liu. Zhiguo Hu. Aus...

Response to Baron and Jost's False Equivalence: Are Liberals and Conservatives in the U.S. Equally “Biased”?

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Partisan Bias and Its Discontents. Peter Ditto et al. Perspectives on Psychological Science, Nov 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Technology entrepreneurs support liberal redistributive, social, & globalistic policies but conservative regulatory policies

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Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs. David E. Broockman, Gregory ...
Friday, November 23, 2018

Biased Study: Krebs et al.'s “Effect of Opioid vs Nonopioid Medications on Pain-Related Function in Patients With Chronic Back Pain or Hip or Knee Osteoarthritis Pain

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Uncritical Publication of a Biased Study Leads to Misleading Media Reports. Lynn R Webster. Pain Medicine, pny234, https://doi.org/10.1093/p...

Inverse association between caffeine intake and depressive symptoms in US adults

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Inverse association between caffeine intake and depressive symptoms in US adults: data from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey...
Thursday, November 22, 2018

Increased marriage age across these cohorts contributed to the assortative mating and thus to the rising inequality; the increase in marriage age can explain almost 80% of the increase in the assortative mating

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Assortative Mating and Inequality. Alparslan Tuncay. Job Market Paper, Nov 19 2018. https://drive.google.com/file/d/165eaweyxlId9NcTYa5RxzfM...

Body size estimation: Greater underestimation for self than other body size emerged; positive attitudes towards the self make young adults' own body size closer to the ideal body (thinner bodies were judged as more attractive)

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Thinner than yourself: self-serving bias in body size estimation. Mara Mazzurega, Jlenia Marisa, Massimiliano Zampini, Francesco Pavani. Psy...

Much of theory in sociology consists of articles propounding theories that cannot be falsified, grounded in confirmation bias, crafted in a strange & inaccessible argot, appealing to pathos in the creation of a Moloch upon which to hang blame for the world’s ills

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Avatars of the New Dark Age: Moloch, Magical Thinking, and the Anti-Scientific Spirit. Stanley Ridgley. https://www.researchgate.net/publica...

Cerebral blood flow changes after a day of wake, sleep, & sleep deprivation: There are morning-to-evening increases in cerebral blood flow, reversed by a night of sleep; a night of sleep deprivation is linked to further cerebral blood flow increases

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Cerebral blood flow changes after a day of wake, sleep, and sleep deprivation. Torbjørn Elvsåshagen et al. NeuroImage, https://doi.org/10.10...

The Joy of Lottery Play: Lottery participation increased the happiness of participants before the draw; winning a small prize had no effect on happiness; it seems that people may not only care about the outcomes of the lottery, but also enjoy the game

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The Joy of Lottery Play: Evidence from a Field Experiment. Martijn Burger, Martijn Hendriks, Emma Pleeging, Jan C. van Ours. Tinbergen Insti...

Time Use and Happiness of Millionaires: Two large-scale surveys of millionaires and the general population show that millionaires spend their time in surprisingly similar ways as the general population

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Time Use and Happiness of Millionaires. Paul Smeets, Rene Bekkers, Ashley V. Whillans, Michael Norton. Harvard Business School Working Paper...

Touching narratives motivate to give to charity, and phylosophical arguments have difficulties in this task

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Narrative but Not Philosophical Argument Motivates Giving to Charity. Eric Schwitzgebel and Christopher McVey. Provisional results, The Spli...
Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Early childhood investment impacts social decision-making four decades later

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Early childhood investment impacts social decision-making four decades later. Yi Luo, Sébastien Hétu, Terry Lohrenz, Andreas Hula, Peter Day...

Practicing cognitive-training programs or intellectually demanding activities do not enhance any cognitive skill; at best, such interventions boost one’s performance in tasks similar to the trained task

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Cognitive Training Does Not Enhance General Cognition. Giovanni Sala, Fernand Gobet. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/j...

The field of nutrition could regain lost credibility by acknowledging the empirical & theoretical refutations of their memory-based methods & ensure use of rigorous methods to study the role of diet in chronic disease; see also comments against

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The Failure to Measure Dietary Intake Engendered a Fictional Discourse on Diet-Disease Relations. Edward Archer, Carl J. Lavie and James O. ...

More psychopathic, narcissistic, & Machiavellian individuals possess a reasonable degree of insight into their trait levels & impairment, against theory, which holds that individuals’ ability to recognize the presence, severity, & impact of pathological traits is low

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Sleep, Chelsea, Josh Miller, Donald Lynam, and William K. Campbell. 2018. “Antagonism-related Pds Insight & Impairment 11.13.18.” PsyArX...

Overall, both a women’s and her spouse’s income is significantly negatively associated with the woman’s number of children; probability to remain childless increases with increasing own, but decreases with increasing spouse’s income

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Effects of woman’s and husband’s income on woman’s reproduction: Darwinian perspectives on human mating. Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber. Fr...
Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Positive affect (PA) was associated with positive interpretations of neutral faces; PA & life satisfaction were associated with positive interpretations of ambiguous and positive, but not negative, social interaction vignettes

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Subjective Well-Being, Social Interpretation, and Relationship Thriving. Samantha J. Heintzelman. Ed Diener. Journal of Research in Personal...

Rolf Degen summarizing: Yet more evidence that the Implicit Association Test, though to be a neutral test instrument, changes the attitudes it is intended to assess, possibly making the cure worse than the disease

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Implicit Association Test as an Analogical Learning Task. Ian Hussey and Jan De Houwer. Experimental Psychology (2018), 65, pp. 272-285. htt...

Further examining the potential association between birth order and personality: Null results from a national sample of American siblings

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Further examining the potential association between birth order and personality: Null results from a national sample of American siblings. C...

Do certain personality traits provide a mating market competitive advantage? Sex, offspring & the Big five

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Do certain personality traits provide a mating market competitive advantage? Sex, offspring & the big 5. Stephen Whyte, Robert C. Brooks...

Popular areas of research—brain training, mind-set, grit, deliberate practice, & bilingual advantage—overstate that environmental factors are the overwhelming determinants of success in real-world pursuits

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Overstating the Role of Environmental Factors in Success: A Cautionary Note. David Moreau, Brooke N. Macnamara, David Z. Hambrick. Current D...

Completing a Race Test Increases Implicit Racial Bias: By measuring, we often perturb the system that we wish to understand

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Hussey, Ian, and Jan De Houwer. 2018. “Completing a Race IAT Increases Implicit Racial Bias.” PsyArXiv. November 19. doi:10.31234/osf.io/vxs...
Monday, November 19, 2018

From 2016 > The natural selection of bad science, logical consequences of structural incentives: selection for high output leads to poorer methods and increasingly high false discovery rates

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The natural selection of bad science. Paul E. Smaldino, Richard McElreath. Royal Society Open Science, Sep 21 2016. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.160384...

How mindfulness is currently being invented as a scientific fact or object of inquiry: On the porosity of subject & object in “mindfulness” scientific study, & challenges to “scientific” construction, operationalization & measurement of mindfulness

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On the porosity of subject and object in “mindfulness” scientific study: Challenges to “scientific” construction, operationalization and mea...

How Hawkish Is the Chinese Public?: The young, netizens & elites are even more inclined to call on the Chinese government to invest and rely more on military strength

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Weiss, Jessica Chen, How Hawkish Is the Chinese Public?: Another Look at ‘Rising Nationalism’ and Chinese Foreign Policy (August 31, 2018). ...

Maria Montessori concluded that pretend play and fantasy were not as helpful for children's development

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Pretend Play and Fantasy: What if Montessori Was Right? Angeline S. Lillard, Jessica Taggart. Child Development Perspectives, https://doi.or...

Access to copulation decreases measures of male sexual motivation when male subjects were visually exposed to the female they had copulated with & this effect is not counteracted by the view of a new female

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Effects of a novel partner and sexual satiety on the expression of male sexual behavior and brain aromatase activity in quail. Catherinede B...
Sunday, November 18, 2018

For the dreamer, the dream world is the real world, best explained in terms of the concept of mental ownership: the exogenous nature of that narrative is the result of an individual assuming perspectival, not personal, ownership of the content

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B. Klein, Stan. (2018). The phenomenology of REM-sleep dreaming: The contributions of personal and perspectival ownership, subjective tempor...

Saving regret (the wish in hindsight to have saved more earlier in life): little of the variation is explained by procrastination & psychological factors; unemployment, health & divorce explain much more

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Saving Regret. Axel H. Börsch-Supan, Tabea Bucher-Koenen, Michael D. Hurd, Susann Rohwedder. NBER Working Paper No. 25238, Nov 2018. https:/...
Saturday, November 17, 2018

Gene discovery & polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study in 1.1 million individuals: Explain 11–13% of the variance in educational attainment & 7–10% in cognitive performance

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Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. James J. ...

Associations & civil society as key factors in a healthy liberal democracy: do individuals who are members of civil associations vote less for populist parties?; & does membership in associations decrease when populist parties are in power?

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Populism and Civil Society. Tito Boeri; Prachi Mishra; Chris Papageorgiou; Antonio Spilimbergo. Int'l Monetary Fund, Working Paper No. 1...

Active-sampling policies & their relation to attention & curiosity: Sampling & search depend on individual preferences over cognitive states, including attitudes towards uncertainty, learning progress & types of information

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Towards a neuroscience of active sampling and curiosity. Jacqueline Gottlieb & Pierre-Yves Oudeyer. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, volume ...

Generational changes in personality & frequencies of individual words 1900-2002: Modest increase for Extraversion-, Agreeableness-, and Stability-related adjectives; Intellect-related words increased up to 1960, then declined

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Generational Changes in Personality: The Evidence From Corpus Linguistics. Eka Roivainen. Psychological Reports, https://doi.org/10.1177/003...

I’m not the person I used to be: Bad actions that happened further in the past are more morally wrong than those that happened more recently

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Stanley, M. L., Henne, P., Iyengar, V., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & De Brigard, F. (2017). I’m not the person I used to be: The self and au...

Arguably this is causal evidence that teacher expectations affect students' educational attainment

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Teacher Expectations Matter. Nicholas W. Papageorge, Seth Gershenson, Kyung Min Kang. NBER Working Paper No. 25255, Nov 2018. https://www.nb...
Friday, November 16, 2018

Greater frequency of group sex is associated with buying sex, sex with an injection drug user, being high during sex, condomless vaginal sex, victimization history, & sexually transmitted infection incidence

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Frequency of Group Sex Participation and Risk for HIV/STI Among Young Adult Nightclub Scene Participants. Mance E. Buttram, Maria E. Pagano ...

Orgasm Range and Variability in Humans: Among others, exercise, sleep, drug use, riding in vehicles & rollercoasters, breastfeeding, eating, reading, defecating, auditory stimulation, childbirth, getting tattoed or pierced

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Orgasm Range and Variability in Humans: A Content Analysis. Debby Herbenick, Katie Barnhart, Karly Beavers & Dennis Fortenberry. Interna...

Participants were provided with a list of racist behaviors that purportedly were enacted from a fellow student but in fact were based on the participants’ own behaviors; consistently evaluated themselves as less racist

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Examining the asymmetry in judgments of racism in self and others. Angela C. Bell, Melissa Burkley & Jarrod Bock. The Journal of Social ...

The effects of parental divorce on individuals’ commitment to same-sex relationships

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The effects of parental divorce on individuals’ commitment to same-sex relationships. Lisa M. Godfrey, Amanda D. Kuryluk & Sarah W. Whit...

When given an opportunity to release the robots from restrainers, as they do for conspecifics, we found that rats did release the robots, & moreover, were significantly more likely to release helpful than unhelpful robots

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Quinn, L. K., Schuster, L. P., Aguilar-Rivera, M., Arnold, J., Ball, D., Gygi, E., Heath, S., Holt, J., Lee, D. J., Taufatofua, J., Wiles, J...

Gender differences were smaller than previously theorized, with 10.3% of men and 7.0% of women endorsing clinically relevant levels of distress or impairment associated with difficulty controlling sexual feelings, urges, & behavior

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Prevalence of Distress Associated With Difficulty Controlling Sexual Urges, Feelings, and Behaviors in the United States. Janna A. Dickenson...

Strategies people spontaneously use in their everyday lives to regulate their persistence during aversive activities; trait self-control & strategy use appear to represent separate routes to good self-regulation

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Hennecke, Marie, Thomas Czikmantori, and Veronika Brandstätter. 2018. “Doing Despite Disliking: Self-regulatory Strategies in Everyday Avers...
Thursday, November 15, 2018

Thoughts about the present were common during social interaction, felt pleasant, but lacked to meaningfulness; about the past were relatively unpleasant and involuntary

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Baumeister, Roy. 2018. “Everyday Thoughts in Time: Experience Sampling Studies of Mental Time Travel.” PsyArXiv. October 2. doi:10.31234/osf...

Though women are generally more liberal than men, on marijuana legalization are more conservative; best explanations are women's greater religiosity and men's greater drug use

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Gender and the Politics of Marijuana. Laurel Elder, Steven Greene. Social Science Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12558 Abstract ...