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Gordon Gekko on Handling Other People’s Money
In a scene from the 2010 film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, financial trader Gordon Gekko — played by Michael Douglas — defines moral hazard as a situation in which “somebody takes your money and he is not responsible for it.” A team of European researchers cite this cinematic example in a recently published study on how people feel when they take economic risks on someone else’s behalf, rather than their own. Scientists from the Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive in France found that when we entrust our money to someone else, they tend to not handle it as carefully as they would their own.
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Cognitive Science Society 36th Annual Conference
The 36th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society will be held July 23–26, 2014, in Quebec City, Canada. Entries to be reviewed may be submitted in categories such as papers, symposia, presentation-based talks, member abstracts, tutorials, and workshops. They may focus on any area of cognitive science. For more information, see the conference home page.
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After Committing a Crime, Guilt and Shame Predict Re-Offense
Within three years of being released from jail, two out of every three inmates in the US wind up behind bars again -- a problem that contributes to the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. New research suggests that the degree to which inmates’ express guilt or shame may provide an indicator of how likely they are to re-offend. The findings show that inmates who feel guilt about specific behaviors are more likely to stay out of jail later on, whereas those that are inclined to feel shame about the self might not. This research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Virtual Avatars May Impact Real-World Behavior
How you represent yourself in the virtual world of video games may affect how you behave toward others in the real world, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our results indicate that just five minutes of role-play in virtual environments as either a hero or villain can easily cause people to reward or punish anonymous strangers,” says lead researcher Gunwoo Yoon of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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How Your Smartphone Can Affect Your Well-Being
Volkswagen turns off some workers’ email 30 minutes after quitting time. BMW is instituting new rules that will guard employees from being contacted after working hours. In fact, an increasing number of companies have created similar rules, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Employers appear to be recognizing, after years of freely contacting workers on their smartphones at any time of the day or night, that employees need to be able to escape from work.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Auditory Processing in Growth-Restricted Fetuses and Newborns and Later Language Development Barbara S. Kisilevsky, Beverly Chambers, Kevin C. H. Parker, and Gregory A. L. Davies Past research has found that children who are born small for their gestational age are at risk for language deficits. In the first of three studies, fetuses that were of average size for their gestational age (AGA) were played audio recordings of a passage of text being read by their mothers.
