Sunday, November 15, 2020

First impressions are commonly assumed to be particularly important; instead, judgments of the targets in later situations were more strongly associated with overall impressions, indicating an acquaintance effect

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There Is No Primacy Effect in Interpersonal Perception: A Series of Preregistered Analyses Using Judgments of Actual Behavior. Anne Wiedenro...

Rolf Degen summarizing... Although dopamine boost the anticipation of rewards in humans, it has little or no effect on felt pleasure during the fulfillment of needs

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Using pharmacological manipulations to study the role of dopamine in human reward functioning: A review of studies in healthy adults. Heathe...
Saturday, November 14, 2020

We find that sunlight strongly protects against getting influenza: A 10% increase in relative sunlight decreases the influenza index in September or October by 1.1 points on a 10-point scale

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Sunlight and Protection Against Influenza. David J.G. Slusky, Richard J. Zeckhauser. Economics & Human Biology, November 14 2020, 100942...

Mixed-gender threesomes (MGTs): Sexual minority individuals reported more positive outcomes than did heterosexual individuals; there is a lot of interaction with sexual minority individuals in MGTs

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Exploring Variations in North American Adults’ Attitudes, Interest, Experience, and Outcomes Related to Mixed-Gender Threesomes: A Replicati...

According to Harden, the more fundamental reason why progressives should embrace social genomics is that it can help to transform how we, as a society, think about public policy altogether

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The genes we’re dealt. Erik Parens. Aeon, Nov 10 2020. https://aeon.co/essays/social-genomics-can-combat-inequality-or-be-used-to-justify-it...

Together the studies suggest that men have more perceived power in the public domain, however, this domain has a lower preference weighting than the private domain where women have more power than men

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Weighting power by preference eliminates gender differences. Sverker Sikström ,Laura Mai Stoinski,Kristina Karlsson,Lotta Stille,Johan Willa...

Stimulating reflection on organ donation reduces reported registrations as donors; a commitment nudge does not increase the willingness to become an organ donor, & reduces procrastination reasons for not becoming one

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Thinking about and deciding to be an organ donor: An experimental analysis. Justin Buffat, Lorenz Goette, Simona Grassi. Social Science ...
Friday, November 13, 2020

The marginalization of children and childhood, it is proposed, has obscured our understanding of how cultural forms emerge and why they are sustained

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From 2002... Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children? Lawrence A. Hirschfeld. American Anthropologist, June 2002. https://doi.org/10.152...

David Schmitt summarizing... Very skinny men are viewed as a little more likely to be "kinky" or "prudish" (wait, what?)

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The Influence of Body Shape on Impressions of Sexual Traits. Flora Oswald, Amanda Champion & Cory L. Pedersen. The Journal of Sex Resear...

The sexual selection of young American females may have shifted via exposure to media images of extreme male physiques; they seem to prefer mating with better bodies than before, as men already did

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Does Exercise Make Me More Attractive? Exploring the Relations Between Exercise and Mate Value. Urska Dobersek, Bridget Stallings, Gabrielle...

Those who had a therapist discuss the possibility of repressed memory were 28.6 times more likely to report recovered memories; of those who reported recovered memories, 60% cut off contact with some of their family

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Reports of Recovered Memories in Therapy in Undergraduate Students. Lawrence Patihis et al. Psychological Reports, November 11, 2020. https:...

Moral Outrage and Punishment in Response to (even Minor) Alterations to Rituals

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Stein, Daniel, Juliana Schroeder, Nick Hobson, Francesca Gino, and Michael I. Norton. 2020. “When Alterations Are Violations: Moral Outrage ...
Thursday, November 12, 2020

Plausible deniability: People often attribute rumours to an individual in a knowledgeable position two steps removed from them (a credible friend of a friend)

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It happened to a friend of a friend: inaccurate source reporting in rumour diffusion. Sacha Altay, Nicolas Claidière and Hugo Mercier. Evolu...

The evolution of mate choice: A key mechanism may be the sense of beauty—the feeling whose function it is to reward attention to, and engagement with, attractive objects

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Back to the Basics of Mate Choice: The Evolutionary Importance of Darwin’s Sense of Beauty. Rafael Lucas Rodríguez. The Quarterly Review of ...
Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Both face and body images were rated as being more attractive when presented in groups than when presented in isolation, demonstrating that the cheerleader effect is not restricted to faces

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The ‘cheerleader effect’ in facial and bodily attractiveness: A result of memory bias and not perceptual encoding. Jean Y J Hsieh et al. Qua...

Not only is there a smell of fear, but this also renders fear “contagious”: People who smelled armpit fear became physiologically aroused (increased galvanic skin response)

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A Path to Identifying the Smell of Fear. Shiri Karagach et al. Chemical Senses, 2020, Vol 45, 699–804, The Eighteenth International Symposiu...

Paternity uncertainty profoundly shapes human relationships, reducing not only the investment contributed by paternal versus maternal kin, but also forms of prosocial behavior between individuals

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Bressan, Paola, and Peter Kramer. 2020. “Human Kin Detection.” PsyArXiv. November 11. doi:10.1002/wcs.1347 Rolf Degen's take:  https://t...
Tuesday, November 10, 2020

No mechanism known to explain positive observed effect of 2.45 GHz Wi‐Fi exposure on sleep‐dependent memory consolidation

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Effects of 2.45 GHz Wi‐Fi exposure on sleep‐dependent memory consolidation. Ana Bueno‐Lopez  Torsten Eggert  Hans Dorn  Gernot Schmid  Rene ...