Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Why Smart People Are Vulnerable to Putting Tribe Before Truth

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Why Smart People Are Vulnerable to Putting Tribe Before Truth. Dan M Kahan. Scientific American, Dec 03 2018. https://blogs.scientificameric...

Are Sex Differences in Preferences for Physical Attractiveness and Good Earning Capacity in Potential Mates Smaller in Countries with Greater Gender Equality? This was not replicable.

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Zhang, Lingshan, Anthony J. Lee, Lisa M. DeBruine, and Benedict C. Jones. 2018. “Are Sex Differences in Preferences for Physical Attractiven...

Uncoordinated dances associated with high reproductive success in a crane

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Uncoordinated dances associated with high reproductive success in a crane. Kohei F Takeda Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa Nobuyuki Kutsukake. Behavi...

Curiosity share common neural mechanisms with extrinsic incentives (i.e. hunger for foods): acceptance (compared to rejection) of curiosity/incentive-driven gambles was accompanied with an enhanced activity in the striatum

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Hunger for Knowledge: How the Irresistible Lure of Curiosity is Generated in the Brain. Johnny King L Lau, Hiroki Ozono, Kei Kuratomi, Asuka...

Revisiting the Form and Function of Conflict: Neurobiological, Psychological and Cultural Mechanisms for Attack and Defense Within and Between Group

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Revisiting the Form and Function of Conflict: Neurobiological, Psychological and Cultural Mechanisms for Attack and Defense Within and Betwe...

The key mechanism that generates scientific polarization involves treating evidence generated by other agents as uncertain when their beliefs are relatively different from one’s own

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Scientific polarization. Cailin O’Connor, James Owen Weatherall. European Journal for Philosophy of Science. October 2018, Volume 8, Issue 3...

“All the Gays Are Liberal?” Sexuality and Gender Gaps in Political Perspectives among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Mostly Heterosexual, and Heterosexual College Students in the Southern USA

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“All the Gays Are Liberal?” Sexuality and Gender Gaps in Political Perspectives among Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Mostly Heterosexual, and Heter...

Lower Waist-to-hip, Waist-to-stature, and Waist-to-bust Ratios Predict Higher Rankings of Plus-size Models

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Aung, Toe, and Leah Williams. 2018. “Lower Waist-to-hip, Waist-to-stature, and Waist-to-bust Ratios Predict Higher Rankings of Plus-size Mod...
Monday, December 3, 2018

Social animals show elaborate cognitive skills to deal with others, but there are few reports of animals physically using social agents & their respective responses as means to an end—social tool use; origins of Machiavellian intelligence

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Schweinfurth, M. K., DeTroy, S. E., van Leeuwen, E. J. C., Call, J., & Haun, D. B. M. (2018). Spontaneous social tool use in chimpanzees...

Sharing food from a single plate increased perceived coordination among diners, which in turn led them to behave more cooperatively & less competitively toward each other; the effect on cooperation occurred among strangers also

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Shared Plates, Shared Minds: Consuming  from a Shared Plate Promotes Cooperation. Kaitlin Woolley & Ayelet Fishbach. In press, Psycholog...
Sunday, December 2, 2018

A ‘Nordic model’ to respond to prostitution? More violence, adaptation of the sex industry, no reduction in trafficking

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No model in practice: a ‘Nordic model’ to respond to prostitution? Sarah Kingston, Terry Thomas. Crime, Law and Social Change, https://link....
Saturday, December 1, 2018

When Those We Love Misbehave: For the most part, we evaluate them & their unethical actions less harshly, but exhibit greater negative effects on our own morality & perceived relationships when close others act unethically, compared to strangers

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When the Ones We Love Misbehave: Exploring Moral Processes in Intimate Bonds. Rachel Chubak Forbes. Master of Arts Thesis, Psychology. Unive...

Are Bigger Brains Smarter? There is a consistent association. Evidence From a Large-Scale Preregistered Study

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Are Bigger Brains Smarter? Evidence From a Large-Scale Preregistered Study. Gideon Nave et al. Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.117...
Friday, November 30, 2018

Depression treatments: The effects are probably overestimated, relapse rates for patients who respond are very high (about 50% over 2 years), there is little evidence for long-term effectiveness, & there are the problems of publication bias, sponsorship bias, & others

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The Challenges of Improving Treatments for Depression. Pim Cuijpers. JAMA. Published online November 30, 2018. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.17824 I...

The article thus challenges the general notion that ‘terrorism always ends’; only certain types of jihadists will end, while others—such as al-Qaida & Islamic State—may survive indefinitely

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Jihadism after the ‘Caliphate’: towards a new typology. Anne Stenersen. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/1...

Is creativity, hands-on modeling and cognitive learning gender-dependent?

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Is creativity, hands-on modeling and cognitive learning gender-dependent? Julia Mierdel, Franz X. Bogner. Thinking Skills and Creativity, Vo...

Animated Disney female characters that exhibit low WHRs should be perceived as good; lower waist-to-hip ratio is more commonly associated with Disney princesses than Disney female villains

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Aung, T., & Williams, L. (2018). Mirror, mirror on the wall: Whose figure is the fairest of them all? Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, ...

Some articles on psychology of animals

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The mating preferences of female fruitflies are strongly influenced by the existing preferences they observe in other females, generating...

From 2017: Exceptionalism is not exceptional in relation to sexual and reproduction mechanisms — Contrasts of human and animal sexuality

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Exceptionalism is not exceptional in relation to sexual and reproduction mechanisms: Contrasts of human and animal sexuality. Roy J. Levin. ...

From 2013: Sexual Wiring of Women's Breasts — Neuroscientists establish breasts as sexual organs

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Sexual Wiring of Women's Breasts. Nigel Barber. Psychology Today, May 07, 2013. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/...

The mating preferences of female fruitflies are strongly influenced by the existing preferences they observe in other females, generating traditions that are repeatedly passed on to others and spread in the population

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Culture and conformity shape fruitfly mating. Andrew Whiten et al. Science Vol. 362, Issue 6418, pp. 998-999. DOI: 10.1126/science.aav5674 S...
Thursday, November 29, 2018

Vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening; snake phobia, & not spider phobia, was found to be related to perceiving vertical pupils as threatening

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The evil eye effect: vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening. Sinan Alper, Elif Oyku Us & Dicle Rojda Tasman. Cognition and Em...

In matters of the heart, as in many other matters generally, we adhere to existing states (“status quo bias”) & value them more (“endowment effect”)

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I Have, Therefore I Love: Status Quo Preference in Mate Choice. Gul Gunaydin et al. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, https://doi....

Psychopathy and homicide are importantly linked and that psychopathic personality functioning is a significant risk factor for various forms of lethal violence

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Psychopathic killers: A meta-analytic review of the psychopathy-homicide nexus. Bryanna Fox, Matt DeLisi. Aggression and Violent Behavior, h...

An oxytocin receptor gene has been associated with emotional traits such as positive affect and related constructs such as optimism and self-esteem; this seems not replicable

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The Oxytocin Receptor Gene (OXTR) Variant rs53576 is Not Related to Emotional Traits or States in Young Adults. Tamlin S. Conner et al. Fron...

Mindfulness not related to behavioral & speech markers of emotional positivity (or less negativity), interpersonally better connected (quality or quantity), or prosocial orientation (more affectionate, less gossipy or complaining)

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Dispositional mindfulness in daily life: A naturalistic observation study. Deanna M. Kaplan, L. Raison, Anne Milek, Allison M. Tackman, Thad...
Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Those who minimize (vs. acknowledge) the extent to which their group is the target of discrimination report better well-being across myriad indicators: body mass index, social well-being, self-esteem, depression, & mental illness diagnosis

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The Palliative Effects of System Justification on the Health and Happiness of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Individuals. Alexandra...

Border wall expansion, 2007-2010, harmed Mexican workers & high-skill U.S. workers, but benefited U.S. low-skill ones; reduced trade costs between US & Mexico by 25% should have reduced Mexico to US migration with welfare gains

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Border Walls. Treb Allen, Cauê de Castro Dobbin, Melanie Morten. NBER Working Paper No. 25267, Nov 2018, https://www.nber.org/papers/w25267 ...

To quantify partisan audience bias, we developed a domain-level score by leveraging the sharing propensities of registered voters on a large Twitter panel; we found little evidence for the "filter bubble'' hypothesis

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Auditing Partisan Audience Bias within Google Search. Ronald E. Robertson et al. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction - CSCW...

Young adult mental health and functional outcomes among individuals with remitted, persistent and late-onset ADHD

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Agnew-Blais, J., Polanczyk, G., Danese, A., Wertz, J., Moffitt, T., & Arseneault, L. (2018). Young adult mental health and functional ou...

Attitudes towards robots became more negative between 2012 and 2017; robots assisting at work showed the strongest negative trend; countries with a larger share of older citizens evaluated robots more favorably

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Are robots becoming unpopular? Changes in attitudes towards autonomous robotic systems in Europe. Timo Gnambs, Markus Appel. Computers in Hu...

The impact of pseudo-psychological demonstrations make people believe that one can read a person’s mind by evaluating micro expressions, psychological profiles & muscle activities, & can prime a person’s behaviour through subtle suggestions

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Fake science: The impact of pseudo-psychological demonstrations on people’s beliefs in psychological principles. Yuxuan Lan, Christine Mohr,...

Doubling the permissible length of a Tweet led to more polite, less informal, more analytical, and overall healthier discussions online

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Jaidka, Kokil and Zhou, Alvin and Lelkes, Yphtach, Brevity is the soul of Twitter: The constraint affordance and political discussion (Novem...

Study with rats sheds light on why women are roughly twice as likely as men to develop depression, anxiety and other stress-related problems, including difficulty with attention

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Early Life Stress Drives Sex-Selective Impairment in Reversal Learning by Affecting Parvalbumin Interneurons in Orbitofrontal Cortex of Mice...
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...