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What was B.F. Skinner really like? A study parses his traits
March 20th marks the birthday of famed behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, who would have turned 108 today. Besides Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner was the most famous and perhaps the most influential psychologist of the 20th century. But his own “radical behaviorism”—the idea that behavior is caused solely by environmental factors, never by thoughts or feelings—made him a magnet of controversy, which grew even more intense with the publication of his best-known book, Beyond Freedom & Dignity.
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An Unconventional Solution to Social Ills
Social scientists have hard job, and it’s possible they have a harder job than engineers and physicists. At the very least, Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich in Switzerland thinks that they’re further behind. “Today we are understanding a lot about our physical world and about our universe; also, we have invested a lot in understanding our environment,” says Helbing, who is Scientific Coordinator of FuturITC. “But so far, there’s a lack of understanding of social economic systems.” Social systems are hard to understand because they’re immensely complicated.
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Is modern medicine ill with dehumanization? New article offers a diagnosis, unveils its causes, and prescribes a humanizing cure
“Anyone who has been admitted into a hospital or undergone a procedure, even if cared for in the most appropriate way, can feel as though they were treated like an animal or object,” says Harvard University psychologist and physician Omar Sultan Haque. Health care workers enter their professions to help people; research shows that empathic, humane care improves outcomes. Yet dehumanization is endemic. The results can be disastrous: neglect of necessary treatments or prescription of excessive, painful procedures or dangerous drugs. What are the causes and effects of dehumanization in medicine? And what can be done about it?
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Why Bilinguals Are Smarter
The New York Times: SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century.
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Lack Of Compassion Can Make People Feel Less Moral, Study Shows
Huffington Post: When a stranger asks for money, people choose not to give for a variety of reasons, even if their hearts want to -- perhaps they're not sure what the money will be used for, or perhaps they'd rather give to an organization that helps people in need. Or maybe they just don't want to part with their cash. But a new study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that there could be a hidden cost to not being compassionate -- it might make you feel a little less moral. "Compassion is such a powerful emotion. It's been called a moral barometer," study researcher Daryl Cameron, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a statement.
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Your Brain on Fiction
The New York Times: AMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words.