-
Forget the Money, Follow the Sacredness
The New York Times: In the film version of “All the President’s Men,” when Robert Redford, playing the journalist Bob Woodward, is struggling to unravel the Watergate conspiracy, an anonymous source advises him to “follow the money.” It’s a good rule of thumb for understanding the behavior of politicians. But following the money leads you astray if you’re trying to understand voters. Self-interest, political scientists have found, is a surprisingly weak predictor of people’s views on specific issues. Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens.
-
Does your mind wander while performing daily tasks?
From CBC News: If you're having trouble reading the entirety of this article without your mind wandering off, it might actually be a good thing. Just stay with us for a moment. According to a new study published in the journal Psychological Science, people whose minds wander during minor tasks have a greater amount of working memory. University of Wisconsin-Madison News describes working memory as "a sort of a mental workspace that allows you to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously." The report was written by the university's Daniel Levinson and Richard Davidson, as well as Dr. Jonathan Smallwood of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
