Sunday, August 9, 2020

Evidence of a tendency to perceive bodies in static poses as more feminine and bodies in dynamic poses as more masculine; & male bodies were judged more dynamic than female bodies with the same pose

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Motion and Gender-Typing Features Interact in the Perception of Human Bodies. Giulia D’Argenio, Alessandra Finisguerra and Cosimo Urgesi. Fr...

The US has now an active force structure of just 39 maneuver brigades (Army and Marines); only about 13 are combat ready; to add more brigades would require cannibalization of about 25% of the remaining 26 active units

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Israel Versus Anyone: A Military Net Assessment of the Middle East. Kenneth S. Brower. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Mideast...

Why is welfare provision unpopular in China?

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Why is welfare provision unpopular in China? Alex C. H. Chang. Democratization, Jul 22 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2020.1789966 ...

Contrafreeloading is the willingness of animals to work for food when equivalent food is freely available; seen in laboratory animals (pigeons, rats) & captive wild (bears) & domestic animals (cows, pigs); no sign of contrafreeloading among domestic cats

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Contrafreeloading behavior of cats and its relation to activity. Brandon Han, Mikel Delgado, Melissa Bain. 2020 Animal Behavior Society'...

Facts and Myths about Misperceptions

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Facts and Myths about Misperceptions. Brendan Nyhan. Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 34, Number 3—Summer 2020—Pages 220–236. https:/...
Saturday, August 8, 2020

Country‐level optimism was negatively related to GDP per capita, population density, and democratic norms and positively related to income inequality and perceived corruption

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International Optimism: Correlates and Consequences of Dispositional Optimism across 61 Countries. Erica Baranski  Kate Sweeny  Gwendolyn Ga...

The Political Right Is Not More Credulous: Experimental Evidence Against Asymmetric Motivations to Believe False Political Information

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Is the Political Right More Credulous?: Experimental Evidence Against Asymmetric Motivations to Believe False Political Information. Timothy...

The unexpected small decline in Neuroticism suggests that, during the acute phase of COVID-19, feelings of anxiety and distress may be attributed more to the pandemic than to one’s personality

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Change in five-factor model personality traits during the acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic. Angelina R. Sutin et al. PLoS, August 6 2...

Pigeons try to overthrow a stable social order's hierarchy just adding weights to the revolutionaries' bodies; mass loading causes the low-ranked male birds to immediately become more aggressive and rise-up the dominance hierarchy

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Artificial mass loading disrupts stable social order in pigeon dominance hierarchies. Steven J. Portugal, James R. Usherwood, Craig R. White...

Consistent with the proposition that people need to exert autonomy over their decisions, prosocial behavior is most likely to lead to happiness when actors have chosen to provide help

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Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy. Lara B. Aknin  Ashley V. Whillans. Social Issues and Policy Review, August 6 20...
Friday, August 7, 2020

Rather than the crisis fundamentally changing people psychologically, genetic differences between individuals seem to play a fundamental role in shaping psychological & behavioural responses to the COVID-19 crisis

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Genetic correlates of psychological responses to the COVID-19 crisis in young adult twins in Great Britain. Kaili Rimfeld et al. Aug 2020. h...

Imagining the future, remembering the past: Future events were simulated at proportionally higher speed than past events; the density of experience units representing the unfolding of events was lower for future episodes

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The temporal compression of events during episodic future thinking. Olivier Jeunehomme, Nathan Leroy, Arnaud D'Argembeau. Cognition, Aug...