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Little Kids Quickly Learn to Judge a Face
National Geographic: We've all looked at someone's face and thought: "Now there's someone I can really trust." Or perhaps: "I wouldn't trust him with a wooden nickel." To the surprise of social scientists, children as young as three make the same sort of judgments based on nothing more than facial features. That's what researchers found in a new study published in Psychological Science. Mahzarin Banaji, Emily Cogsdill, and Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard andAlexander Todorov of Princeton showed pairs of faces to 99 adults and 141 children ages three to 10. Each pair of faces was designed to connect to one of three adjectives: trustworthy, dominant, or competent.
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Oxytocin Boosts Dishonesty
The Scientist: The hormone oxytocin is usually associated with positive traits like trust, cooperation, and empathy, but scientists have now found that it can make people more dishonest when their lies serve the interests of their group. “This is the best evidence yet that oxytocin is not the ‘moral molecule,’” said Carsten de Dreu from the University of Amsterdam, who co-led the study, which was published today (March 31) in PNAS. “It doesn’t make people more moral or immoral.
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Exploring the Genetics of “I’ll Do It Tomorrow”
Procrastination and impulsivity are genetically linked, suggesting that the two traits stem from similar evolutionary origins related to our ability to pursue and juggle goals.
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Life Is Short, Proust Is Long
The New Yorker: Of all the forms of entertainment, reading is the most laborious. Doing the voices of fictional characters in your head is hard. Remembering their names is also hard. Prolonged sitting, we are told, is as bad for us as smoking. Reading is abysmally sedentary. All motion is confined to the eyes, and there the mechanics are ungainly. The human retina is a sensor that is weakest at its edges. Only at its very center, in a region called the fovea, do we see with sufficient acuity to tell individual letters apart. The fovea is small, just wide enough to encompass eight characters. When we read, we are peering through this pinhole. The analogy is with a blinkered horse. ...
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The Purposeful Life (Hint: Don’t Wait for Retirement)
The Huffington Post: I have several close friends who are contemplating retirement, and a few have been teetering on that decision for a while. They are not hesitating over financial worries, but more over quality of life issues. They want to be sure that the next stage of life is at least as rich and purposeful as their working years have been. They want their days to be full. Who doesn't? But there are other reasons for planning a meaningful retirement, most notably the health benefits. Our later years bring added health risks, but accumulating evidence shows that older people with goals and a clear sense of purpose live longer. But why focus on just the old?
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Truth or lie – trust your instinct, says research
BBC: We are better at identifying liars when we rely on initial responses rather than thinking about it, say psychologists. Generally we are poor at spotting liars - managing only slightly better than flipping a coin. But our success rate rises when we harness the unconscious mind, according to a report in Psychological Science. "What interested us about the unconscious mind is that it just might really be the seat of where accurate lie detection lives," said Dr Leanne ten Brinke of the University of California, Berkeley.
