Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Is Empathy the Default Response to Suffering? A Meta-analytic Evaluation of Perspective-taking’s Effect on Empathic Concern

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McAuliffe, William H., Evan C. Carter, Juliana Berhane, Alexander Snihur, and Michael E. McCullough. 2019. “Is Empathy the Default Response ...

Multiple sclerosis and sugar-sweetened beverages: "and the results do not show that soda and sugar-sweetened beverages cause more severe disability"

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. May someone explain to me this headline?: SODA, SUGAR-SWEETENED BEVERAGES LINKED TO MORE SEVERE SYMPTOMS FOR PEOPLE WITH MS. American ...

The Politics of Beauty: The Effects of Partisan Bias on Physical Attractiveness

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From 2016... The Politics of Beauty: The Effects of Partisan Bias on Physical Attractiveness. Stephen P. Nicholson, Chelsea M. Coe, Jason Em...

Using data covering a wide range of municipal public-sector pension plans from 1962– 2014, I establish that unfunded pension benefits grow faster under Democratic-party mayors

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Political Parties Do Matter in U.S. Cities ... For Their Unfunded Pensions. Christian Dippel. NBER Working Paper No. 25601, Feb 2019. https:...

The majority of regular patrons were dissatisfied with current sound levels, with around three-quarters of participants reporting preferences below the levels typically experienced at music venues

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Time to listen: Most regular patrons of music venues prefer lower volumes. Elizabeth F. Beach and Megan Gilliver. Front. Psychol., Mar 5 201...

The meta-analysis provides additional evidence that extraversion is related to belief in free will

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Extraversion and compatibilist intuitions: a ten-year retrospective and meta-analyses Adam Feltz & Edward Cokely. Philosophical Psychol...

The first systematic review and meta-analysis on laughter-inducing therapies: Overall quality of evidence was low; this research field has yet to reach maturity

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Laughter-inducing therapies: Systematic review and meta-analysis. C. Natalie van der Wal, Robin N.Kok. Social Science & Medicine, https:...

Looking for Mr(s) Right: Decision bias can prevent us from finding the most attractive face

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Looking for Mr(s) Right: Decision bias can prevent us from finding the most attractive face. Nicholas Furl, Bruno B. Averbeck, Ryan T.McKay....

Robots enchanting humans, particularly the phenomenon of robots being perceived by humans as “magical” enough to develop intimate relationships with them (caring robots, sex robots)

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Robots Enchanting Humans. Maciej Musiał. Chapter in Enchanting Robots: Intimacy, Magic, and Technology, pp 11-62. March 01 2019. https://lin...

The same bias that causes someone to take an exploitative loan may also imply that the loan benefits them by causing them to purchase a product or service that they should, but wouldn’t otherwise, buy

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Hayashi, Andrew T., Consumer Law Myopia (February 14, 2019). Virginia Law and Economics Research Paper No. 2019-03. https://ssrn.com/abstrac...

Consumers with food deprivation display lower preference for sustainable food items; hunger operates outside rational awareness and alters gentleness-associations with sustainable products

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Hungry bellies have no ears. How and why hunger inhibits sustainable consumption. Stefan Hoffmann et al. Ecological Economics, Volume 160, J...
Monday, March 4, 2019

Why Women Leave Their Husbands for Other Women

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Why Women Leave Their Husbands for Other Women. Lauren Vinopal. Fatherly, Mar 04 2019. https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/women-bisexua...

Psychological sex differences in humans are real, they can be large and even very large, and evidence suggests evolutionary origins for a broad range of sex differences

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Archer, John  (2019) The reality and evolutionary significance of human psychological sex differences. Biological Reviews, https://doi.org/1...

If emerging technologies are so impressive, why are interest rates so low, wage growth so slow, investment rates so flat, & total factor productivity growth so lukewarm? Lack of genius.

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Digital Abundance and Scarce Genius: Implications for Wages, Interest Rates, and Growth. Seth G. Benzell, Erik Brynjolfsson. NBER Working Pa...

Laterality, or left–right discrimination (LRD) is assumed to be innate or acquired early, but in one study, a majority of students scored less than 77% on an objective LRD test

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Challenging  assumptions of  innateness –leave nothing unturned . Jason J Han & Neha Vapiwala. Medical Education, Mar 3 2019, https://do...

Short-run impacts of the 2018 trade war on the U.S. economy: Annual losses from higher costs, $68.8 bn (0.37% of GDP); after tariff revenue & gains to producers, welfare loss is $6.4 bn (0.03% of GDP)

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The Return to Protectionism. Pablo D. Fajgelbaum, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Patrick J. Kennedy, and Amit K. Khandelwal. Working Paper, Mar 2019,...
Sunday, March 3, 2019

Orgasms with a partner were associated with the perception of favorable sleep outcomes; orgasms achieved through masturbation were associated with the perception of better sleep quality & latency

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Sex and Sleep: Perceptions of Sex as a Sleep Promoting Behavior in the General Adult Population. Michele Lastella et al. Front. Public Healt...

The informal economy share rises after reaching a high GDP... Norway has a bigger shadow economy than the US

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Nonlinearity Between the Shadow Economy and Level of Development. Dong Frank Wu, Friedrich Schneider. IMF Working Paper No. 19/48, Mar 2019....

The organic label leads to an underestimation of caloric value and more consumption; this effect is not moderated by implicit evaluations, maybe by a semantic association between the concepts “organic” & "non-caloric”

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The calories underestimation of “organic” food: Exploring the impact of implicit evaluations. Theo Besson et al. Appetite, https://doi.org/1...

Religions that lose strength... Tyler Cowen's comments on Jana Riess's The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church

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Jana Riess, The Next Mormons: How Millennials are Changing the LDS Church. 2019. Comments by Tyler Cowen, Mar 02 2019, https://marginalrevol...

Now we know why we are smart & prone to addiction too: Ants defend plants they fed on more aggressively against herbivore competitors (termites) when the plant is doused with artificial nectaries

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Nectar quality affects ant aggressiveness and biotic defense provided to plants. Fábio T. Pacelhe et al. bioTropica, Feb 27 2019, https://...

Tversky & Kahneman, 1973, on systematic biases... Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability

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From 1973... Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman. Cognitive Psychology, Volume 5,...

Excellence is not enough: Most UK scientists who publish extremely highly-cited papers do not secure funding from major public and charity funders

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Most UK scientists who publish extremely highly-cited papers do not secure funding from major public and charity funders: A descriptive anal...
Saturday, March 2, 2019

Political partisans disagreed about the importance of conditional probabilities; highly numerate partisans were more polarized than less numerate partisans

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It depends: Partisan evaluation of conditional probability importance. Leaf Van Boven et al. Cognition, Mar 2 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/...

One conclusion that can be drawn from cognitive psychology is that human beings generally perform poorly when thinking in probabilistic terms; acknowledging these human frailties, how can we compensate?

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Collective Intelligence for Clinical Diagnosis—Are 2 (or 3) Heads Better Than 1? Stephan D. Fihn. JAMA Network Open. 2019;2(3):e191071, doi:...

Gay men seem more satisfied with their job than other men; lesbians appear less satisfied with their job than other women; reason could be discrimination, who may lead gay men to have low expectations

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(I can’t get no) jobsatisfaction? Differences by sexual orientation in Sweden. Lina Alden et al. Linnaeus University, 2018. http://www.diva-...

People believe they value their minds more than other people value theirs, and that they value their bodies less

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Jordan, M. R., Gebert, T., & Looser, C. E. (2019). Perspective taking failures in the valuation of mind and body. Journal of Experimenta...

Asymmetry in individuals’ willingness to venture into cross-cutting spaces, with conservatives more likely to follow media and political accounts classified as left-leaning than the reverse

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How Many People Live in Political Bubbles on Social Media? Evidence From Linked Survey and Twitter Data. Gregory Eady et al. SAGE Open, Febr...
Friday, March 1, 2019

Partisans overestimate the negative affect that results from exposure to opposing views; the affective forecasting error derives from underestimation of agreement

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Selective exposure partly relies on faulty affective forecasts. Charles A. Dorison, Julia A. Minson, Todd Rogers. Cognition, https://doi.org...

Implicit Association Test showed a self-other asymmetry, that people perceived a desirable IAT result to be more valid when it applied to themselves than to others, & the opposite held for undesirable IAT results

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Mendonça, C., Mata, A., & Vohs, K. D. (2019). Self-other asymmetries in the perceived validity of the implicit association test. Journal...

Since most drivers believe they are better than average drivers, the benchmark of achieving automation that is safer than an average human driver is not acceptably safe performance for most

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Safer than the average human driver (who is less safe than me)? Examining a popular safety benchmark for self-driving cars. Michael A. Nees....
Thursday, February 28, 2019

Effect of olfactory disgust: Disgust might hamper behavioral actions motivated by sexual arousal (e.g., poor judgment, coercive sexual behavior)

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The influence of olfactory disgust on (Genital) sexual arousal in men. Charmaine Borg, Tamara A. Oosterwijk, Dominika Lisy, Sanne Boesveldt,...

Nations that scored higher on democracy indices, especially emerging ones, experienced increased mortality due to violence; women possessed higher rates of homicide & suicide in democracies

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Government political structure and gender differences in violent death: A longitudinal analysis of forty-three countries, 1960–2008. Morkeh ...

Males from Drosophila m. populations with higher competitive mating success produce sons with lower fitness; male investment in enhanced mating success comes at the cost of reduced offspring quality

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Males from populations with higher competitive mating success produce sons with lower fitness. Trinh T. X. Nguyen  Amanda J. Moehring. Journ...

The wrong belief in the exceptionalism of human cortex has caused to prematurely assign functions distributed widely in the brain to the cortex, & to fail to explore subcortical sources of brain evolution, inter alia

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Human exceptionalism, our ordinary cortex and our research futures. Barbara L. Finlay. Developmental Psychobiology, February 27 2019, https:...

“Dysrationalia” Among University Students: Intelligence & rational thinking, although related, represent two fundamentally different constructs; the intelligent have the same inability to think rationally

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“Dysrationalia” Among University Students: The Role of Cognitive Abilities, Different Aspects of Rational Thought and Self-Control in Explai...

Low replicability damages public trust in psychology; neither information about increased transparency nor explanations for low replicability, nor recovered replicability repaired public trust

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Wingen, Tobias, Jana Berkessel, and Birte Englich. 2019. “No Replication, No Trust? How Low Replicability Influences Trust in Psychology.” O...

It is unlikely that we will find strong relationships between what individuals are reporting about themselves and how they objectively behave

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The Challenges and Opportunities of Small EffectsThe New Normal in Academic Psychiatry. Martin P. Paulus, Wesley K. Thompson. JAMA Psychiatr...
Wednesday, February 27, 2019

When an NHL team has an opportunity to win a playoff series, there appears to be an advantage for visiting teams—not home teams—in winning an overtime game

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A home advantage? Examining 100 years of team success in National Hockey League playoff overtime games. Desmond McEwan. Psychology of Sport ...

Do Equal Employment Opportunity Statements Backfire?: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment on Job-Entry Decisions

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Do Equal Employment Opportunity Statements Backfire?: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment on Job-Entry Decisions. Andreas Leibbrandt an...