Friday, February 21, 2020

Can artificial intelligence, in particular, machine learning algorithms, replace the idea of simple rules, such as first possession and voluntary exchange in free markets, as a foundation for public policy?

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Simple Rules for a Complex World with Artificial Intelligence. Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde. , February 21, 2020. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~j...

The Neurology of Acquired Pedophilia: Twenty-two cases fit our inclusion criteria, all but one were men, and in only one case the injury was localized to the left hemisphere; 18 were hypersexualized

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The Neurology of Acquired Pedophilia. Pedro Maranhão Gomes Lopes et al. The Neural Basis of Cognition, Feb 20 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/...

Online sexually explicit material appeared to have a negligible role in individuals’ current sexual functioning and mental well-being

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A lack of association between online pornography exposure, sexual functioning, and mental well-being. Ruth Chari et al. Sexual and Relations...

Randomly assigned confederates or participants to act extraverted or introverted; interaction partners showed more positive social behaviors with extraverted actors

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Does acting extraverted evoke positive social feedback? Mariya Davydenko et al. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 159, 1 June 2...

Dark personality features were positively associated with competitive worldviews; sometimes had indirect associations with social dominance orientation through competitive worldviews, but not with right-wing authoritarianism

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The darker angels of our nature: Do social worldviews mediate the associations that dark personality features have with ideological attitude...
Thursday, February 20, 2020

We got psychological defenses against manipulation, also in politics; demagogues and disinformation can be explained as tools for achieving coordination of those predisposed for conflict rather than manipulated into conflict

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The Evolutionary Psychology of Mass Mobilization: How Disinformation and Demagogues Coordinate Rather Than Manipulate. Michael Bang Petersen...

From 2012... Japanese herbivore men: Heterosexual men 20-34 who lack ambition, engage in feminine consumption practices, & shirk relationships with the opposite sex; instead of corporate careers, they prefer lower paying, less demanding jobs

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The Rise of 草食系男子 (Soushokukei Danshi) Masculinity and Consumption in Contemporary Japan: A Historic and Discursive Analysis. Steven Chen. I...

Sex differences in familiarity and valence were found for 70 iOS smiley emojis; women reported greater overall use of emojis and had higher familiarity ratings, & rated the negative emojis as more negative than did the men

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Sex differences in emoji use, familiarity, and valence. Lara L. Jones et al. Computers in Human Behavior, February 20 2020, 106305. https://...

Environmental enrichment (EE) reduces sucrose seeking and taking by rats; both overnight (acute) and one month (chronic) EE reduce sucrose seeking and taking

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Environmental enrichment reduces food seeking and taking in rats: A review. Jeffrey W. Grimm, Frances Sauter. Pharmacology Biochemistry and ...

Too much of a good thing? Excessive technology use is not uniquely harmful to mental health; additionally, the negative effects of excessive technology use on psychopathology are partly explained by self-criticism

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Zendle, David. 2020. “Too Much of a Good Thing? Excessive Use Across Behaviours and Associations with Mental Health.” PsyArXiv. February 19....

Both helpers and recipients reported that the benefits of help outweighed the costs (i.e., the help was non-zero-sum); helpers underestimated the degree to which recipients felt indebted as a result of receiving help

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Helping behavior is non-zero-sum: Helper and recipient autobiographical accounts of help. Michael R. Ent et al. Evolution and Human Behavior...
Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Decreasing use of counting & increasing use of direct retrieval & derived facts through years 1–4, girls using counting substantially more and the other two strategies substantially less than boys

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Sex differences in mental strategies for single-digit addition in the first years of school. Pernille B. Sunde, Peter Sunde & Judy Sayer...

Lassitude: Reducing energetically expensive movement to make more energy available to the immune system, reducing exposure to additional infections and injuries, deploying strategies that elicit caregiving behavior from social allies

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Lassitude: The emotion of being sick. Joshua M. Schrock, J. Josh Snodgrass, Lawrence S. Sugiyama. Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 41, I...

Sexting is a common behavior among emerging adults (18-29 y.o.); the prevalence of non-consensual forwarding of sexts was also frequent in emerging adults (15.0%)

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The Prevalence of Sexting Behaviors Among Emerging Adults: A Meta-Analysis. Camille Mori, Jessica E. Cooke, Jeff R. Temple, Anh Ly, Yu Lu, N...

Proust had the intuition that olfactory stimuli are very powerful to recall old episodic memories; olfactory function & memory rapidly decline with age; he didn't know that in addition to remembering the past, memory is used to predict the future

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Did Proust predict the existence of episodic memory? Michel Baudry. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, February 19 2020, 107191. https://d...

Citations have become the dominant way to evaluate scientific contributions & scientists; this way to measure productivity shifted scientist rewards & behavior toward incremental science & away from exploratory projects that are more likely to fail

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Stagnation and Scientific Incentives. Jay Bhattacharya, Mikko Packalen. NBER Working Paper No. 26752, February 2020. DOI 10.3386/w26752 Ab...

Trypophobia (disgust evoked by clusters of holes or round objects) might be a modern emotion and hence, urbanization possibly plays key roles in it; & older people in less urban area did not experience as much trypophobia

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Zhu, Siqi, Kyoshiro Sasaki, Yue Jiang, Kun Qian, and Yuki Yamada. 2019. “Trypophobia as an Urbanized Emotion: Comparative Research in Ethnic...
Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Non-published World Bank study: Aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy

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Elite Capture of Foreign Aid: Evidence from Offshore Bank Accounts. Jørgen Juel Andersen, Niels Johannesen, Bob Rijkers. Conditionally accep...

Pregnant women may strategically employ sexual behavior to secure or reinforce investment in their future offspring, perhaps by reinforcing a partner's perception of paternity

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Women’s sexual strategies in pregnancy. Jaclyn Magginetti, Elizabeth G. Pillsworth. Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 41, Issue 1, Janua...

Crypto AG, BND, NSA, CIA, and the sabotaging of encryption algorithms

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‘The intelligence coup of the century.’ Greg Miller. The Washington Post, Feb. 11, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com For decades, the C...