Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Why thinking over & over about something leads to ever more thoughts about it: Future voluntary imagery can be decoded from activity patterns in the brain up to 11 secs before engaging in voluntary imagery

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Decoding the contents and strength of imagery before volitional engagement. Roger Koenig-Robert & Joel Pearson. Scientific Reports, volu...

Evidence of a pure collaboration effect, distinct from motivations of future reciprocity, in-group favouritism or concern for accountability

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Experimental evidence for a pure collaboration effect. Mary C. McGrath & Alan S. Gerber. Nature Human Behaviour (2019), Feb 18 2019, htt...

Men significantly donated money or other items to panhandlers more often while in the presence of a woman, using this display of generosity and wealth to signal positive attributes to potential mates

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Distribution of Resources to Panhandlers as a Male Display of Potential Mate Quality. Amy Webb & Maryanne L. Fisher. Human Ethology Bull...

Just how miserable is work? It seems that not so much... We feel about the same at work than at non-work.

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Just how miserable is work? A meta-analysis comparing work and non-work affect. Martin J. Biskup, Seth Kaplan, Jill C. Bradley-Geist, Ashley...

The drop in homicide represents a public health breakthrough for African American males, almost a year of increase in life expectancy at birth

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The Impact of the Homicide Decline on Life Expectancy of African American Males. Patrick Sharkey, Michael Friedson. Demography, https://link...

Are Cheaters Sexual Hypocrites? Sexual Hypocrisy, the Self-Serving Bias, and Personality Style

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Are Cheaters Sexual Hypocrites? Sexual Hypocrisy, the Self-Serving Bias, and Personality Style. Benjamin Warach, Lawrence Josephs, Bernard S...

“I Would Never Fall for That”: The Use of an Illegitimate Authority ... Marked discrepancy between how students predicted they would respond and how they actually did; the mean obedience rate was 95.7%

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“I Would Never Fall for That”: The Use of an Illegitimate Authority to Teach Social Psychological Principles. Sally D. Farley, Deborah H. Ca...
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...