Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Central bank papers report larger effects of QE on output and inflation; central bankers are also more likely to report significant effects of QE on output and to use more positive language in the abstract

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Fifty Shades of QE: Conflicts of Interest in Economic Research. Brian Fabo, Martina Jančoková, Elisabeth Kempf, Ľuboš Pástor. NBER Working P...

People are often reluctant to talk to strangers, despite the fact that they are happier when they do so, because of overblown fears of not enjoying the conversation, not liking one’s partner, or lacking conversational skills

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Why do people avoid talking to strangers? A mini meta-analysis of predicted fears and actual experiences talking to a stranger. Gillian M. S...

Why People Forgive Their Intimate Partners’ Infidelity: Having children, followed by own infidelity, reduced likelihood of future infidelity and dependency on partner

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Why People Forgive Their Intimate Partners’ Infidelity: a Taxonomy of Reasons. Menelaos Apostolou & Andriana Demosthenous. Adaptive Huma...

We are all chimeric beings

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We are all chimeric beings. Inspired by Rolf Degen, https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/1311007544081633287 : Remaining cells from a previo...

Algorithms consistently learn to charge supracompetitive prices, without communicating with one another; the high prices are sustained by collusive strategies with a finite phase of punishment followed by a gradual return to cooperation

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Artificial Intelligence, Algorithmic Pricing, and Collusion. Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, Vincenzo Denicolò, and Sergio Pastorello. Am...
Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Declining trends in the formation of romantic relationships, alcohol consumption, and earnings, and increasing computer gaming explain a substantial portion of the decline in young adult sexual activity

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Explaining the Decline in Young Adult Sexual Activity in the United States. Lei Lei  Scott J. South. Journal of Marriage and Family, Septemb...

Differences among students in beliefs in free will and dualism may lead some students to endorse a greater number of common psychological misconceptions

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Psychological Misconceptions and Their Relation to Students’ Lay Beliefs of Mind. Mark Sibicky, Christopher L. Klein, Emily Embrescia. Teach...

Physical Harm Reduction in Domestic Violence: Does Marijuana Make Assaults Safer?

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Physical Harm Reduction in Domestic Violence: Does Marijuana Make Assaults Safer? Jacob Kaplan, Li Sian Goh. Journal of Interpersonal Violen...

Understanding heterosexual women’s erotic flexibility: Sexual orientation may be maintained by differences in attentional processing that cannot be voluntarily altered

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Understanding heterosexual women’s erotic flexibility: the role of attention in sexual evaluations and neural responses to sexual stimuli. J...

Rolf Degen summarizing... Having children does increase happiness, unless it is associated with financial difficulties

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Children, unhappiness and family finances. David G. Blanchflower & Andrew E. Clark. Journal of Population Economics (2020). September 29...
Monday, September 28, 2020

Do people who claim to be dispositionally open-minded, in fact, demonstrate such open-mindedness when they are actually presented with political opinions that run counter to their own? Seems they don't.

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 On Staying Open While Seeing Red: Predicting Open-Mindedness and Affect in Politics. Emily J. Hanson. Ph D Thesis, Psychological and Brain ...

In 1979 marriage was associated with lower earnings among women; by 2018 it was associated with higher earnings, suggesting greater positive selection of women with high earnings potential into marriage

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The Declining Earnings Gap Between Young Women and Men in the United States, 1979-2018. John Iceland, Ilana Redstone. Social Science Researc...

Can nations be ranked on the quality of their elites? Elites are dominant coalitions possessing the strongest coordination capacity over a country’s key resources, creating value or extracting it

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Casas, Tomas and Cozzi, Guido, Elite Quality Report 2020: 32 Country Scores and Global Rank (August 18, 2020). SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.21...

Our unique capability: Once one appreciates that one’s thoughts about the future are just representations, one is in a position to evaluate them, to discount them, or to try to compensate for their shortcomings

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From 2019... The future-directed functions of the imagination: From prediction to metaforesight. Adam Bulley, Jonathan Redshaw, Thomas Sudde...

Involuntary Mental Time Travel into the Episodic Future, Episodic Past, and Episodic Counterfactual Past in Everyday Life

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Branch, Jared. 2020. “Involuntary Mental Time Travel into the Episodic Future, Episodic Past, and Episodic Counterfactual Past in Everyday L...

Compared to others of same age & gender, they believed they were unlikely to experience a range of controllable (eg accidentally infect/ be infected) & uncontrollable (eg need hospitalization/ intensive care treatment) COVID‐19‐related risks in the short term

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Comparative optimism about infection and recovery from COVID‐19; Implications for adherence with lockdown advice. Koula Asimakopoulou  et al...

Participants believed they would be less likely to find a compatible partner through online dating than either through friends or in everyday activities; age & shyness were negatively associated with optimism of finding a partner

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Beliefs About Finding a Compatible Partner in Three Settings. Susan Sprecher. Interpersona, Vol. 13 No. 2 (2019), Jan 6 2020. https://interp...

Almost total lack of empirical analyses of the psychological characteristics or behavioral implications of doll ownership; existing arguments appear to represent the philosophical positions of those scholars expressing them

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Harper, Craig A., and Rebecca Lievesley. 2020. “Sex Doll Ownership: An Agenda for Research.” PsyArXiv. May 19. doi:10.31234/osf.io/2uqkf Rol...
Saturday, September 26, 2020

Personality Evaluated: What Do People Like and Dislike About Themselves and Their Friends?

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Sun, Jessie, Rebecca Neufeld, Paige Snelgrove, and Simine Vazire. 2020. “Personality Evaluated: What Do People Like and Dislike About Themse...

Impact of superstitious beliefs on the timing of marriage and childbirth: Evidence from Denmark

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Impact of superstitious beliefs on the timing of marriage and childbirth: Evidence from Denmark. Evgeny A. Antipov, Elena B. Pokryshevskaya....

Replication of Azar et al. (2013): 70% of customers in Czech restaurants returned excessive change to waiters; the higher the excessive change was, the more honest the customers were

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A field experiment on dishonesty: A registered replication of Azar et al. (2013). Jakub Procházka, Yulia Fedoseev, PetrHoudek. Journal of Be...

Even for the most committed brain trainers, we found no relationship with any cognitive performance measure, regardless of participant age, which brain training program they used, or whether they expected brain training to work

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Stojanoski, B., Wild, C. J., Battista, M. E., Nichols, E. S., & Owen, A. M. (2020). Brain training habits are not associated with genera...

Rolf Degen summarizing... With increasing age, individual differences in personality traits are more and more determined by idiosyncratic life experiences, compared to genes and family upbringing

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Kandler, C., Bratko, D., Butković, A., Hlupić, T. V., Tybur, J. M., Wesseldijk, L. W., de Vries, R. E., Jern, P., & Lewis, G. J. (2020)....

Anthropocentric biases in teleological thinking: How nature seems designed for humans

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Preston, J. L., & Shin, F. (2020). Anthropocentric biases in teleological thinking: How nature seems designed for humans. Journal of Exp...

The absence of pessimism was more strongly related to positive health outcomes than was the presence of optimism

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Scheier, M. F., Swanson, J. D., Barlow, M. A., Greenhouse, J. B., Wrosch, C., & Tindle, H. A. (2020). Optimism versus pessimism as predi...

Among both men & women, a large proportion saw themselves as more masculine or feminine than men & women on average, respectively, suggesting that accentuating one’s gender conformity has a psychological function

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Theo G. M. Sandfort, Henny M. W. Bos, Tsung-Chieh (Jane) Fu, Debby Herbenick & Brian Dodge (2020) Gender Expression and Its Correlates i...

Evolution targets peripheral, not central, aspects of cognition; specialization for language processing has focussed on perceptuomotor aspects of speech rather than on an innate universal grammar

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Sinking In: The Peripheral Baldwinisation of Human Cognition. Cecilia Heyes, Nick Chater, Dominic Michael Dwyer. Trends in Cognitive Science...