Tuesday, November 27, 2018

When asking for assistance, is it beneficial to incentivize a helper by offering a motivated gift (gift with the hope of getting support in return)? Sometimes undermine the assistance that people hope to receive. A third of Americans had given such gift at least once

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aknin, Lara, Dylan Wiwad, and Yuthika Girme. 2018. “Not All Gifts Are Good: The Potential Practical Costs of Motivated Gifts.” PsyArXiv. Nov...

Dystopian novels/movies enhance the willingness to justify radical—especially violent—forms of political action; no evidence for the conventional wisdom that they reduce political trust & efficacy

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It’s the End of the World and They Know It: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes. Calvert W. Jones and Celia Paris. Perspectives...

Men who more strongly endorsed hostile sexism underestimated the power they had compared with their partners’ reports; this perception predicted greater aggression toward female partners; this was not the result of generally being more dominant & aggressive

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An Interdependence Account of Sexism and Power: Men's Hostile Sexism, Biased Perceptions of Low Power, and Relationship Aggression. Emil...

Reading faces: Participants correctly identified the high-narcissism male & female, & the high-psychopathy male significantly more often than by chance, & the high-psychopathy female significantly less often

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Are dark triad cues really visible in faces? Victor Kenji M. Shiramizu, Luca Kozm, Lisa M. DeBruine, Benedict C. Jones. Personality and Indi...

School achievement engenders high expectations about future prospects, yet markets are only contingently sensitive to that achievement; the misalignment schools-markets is perceived by academics as morally unacceptable

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Magni-Berton, R., & Ríos, D. (2018). Why do academics oppose the market? A test of Nozick’s hypothesis. Current Sociology. https://doi.o...
Monday, November 26, 2018

Sensation seeking & the factor intellect/imagination predict liking of horror & frequency of use; gender, educational level, & age are also correlated; people seek out horror media with threatening stimuli that they perceive to be plausible

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Clasen, M., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Johnson, J. A. (2018). Horror, personality, and threat simulation: A survey on the psychology...

Normalized hurricane damage in the continental United States 1900–2017: Consistent with observed trends in the hurricane landfalls, the updated normalized loss estimates also show no trend

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Normalized hurricane damage in the continental United States 1900–2017. Jessica Weinkle, Chris Landsea, Douglas Collins, Rade Musulin, Ryan ...

People will often fight not for individual or collective material gain, but because of their commitment to abstract moral & sacred ideas; decisions to support or oppose war are descriptively deontological & are relatively insensitive to material costs or benefits

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The Moral Logic of Political Violence. Jeremy Ginges. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.11.001 Abstract: T...

Degree of perceived aggression in a robot's behavior did not have a significant impact on their decision to follow the robot's instruction; people often exhibit reactance in situations where they feel their freedom is being threatened

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S. Agrawal and M. Williams, "Would You Obey an Aggressive Robot: A Human-Robot Interaction Field Study," 2018 27th IEEE Internatio...

A 4-Year Longitudinal Study of the Sex-Creativity Relationship: There was female superiority in childhood & early adolescence, & male superiority was not found in adolescence & emerging adulthood

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A 4-Year Longitudinal Study of the Sex-Creativity Relationship in Childhood, Adolescence, and Emerging Adulthood: Findings of Mean and Varia...

Contra media reports, there is no “loneliness epidemic” among older adults; contra previous literature, loneliness may not have cardiometabolic implications; such nonreplications are increasingly common

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Loneliness does (not) have cardiometabolic effects: A longitudinal study of older adults in two countries. Social Science & Medicine, ht...
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...