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The Unexpected Impact of Coded Appeals
The New York Times: After signing into law the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson famously told an aide, “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” Indeed, the Johnson-Goldwater contest was notable in two important respects related to race: it featured the first appearance in almost a century of racial animus as a central dimension of partisan conflict in a presidential election, and it was the last time a Democrat received a majority of the white vote. Attention to matters of race has surged in recent weeks with the appearance of a pair of purportedly race-coded ads.
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Psycho-Trick fördert gesundes Verhalten (Psychological trick promotes healthy behavior)
Der Spiegel: Salat? Oder doch Currywurst und Pommes? Die Wahl des Mittagsessens kann durch einen Kniff überraschenderweise beeinflusst werden. Möglich wird das durch ein grundlegendes psychologisches Konzept - nämlich, wie stark Menschen Körper und Geist als getrennt voneinander wahrnehmen. "Der Geist ist willig, aber das Fleisch ist schwach." Der aus der Bibel stammende Satz ist eines von vielen Beispielen dafür, dass Menschen Geist und Körper als auf gewisse Weise voneinander getrennt wahrnehmen. Das ist auch eine Voraussetzung dafür, an ein Leben nach dem Tod oder etwa an Reinkarnation zu glauben - dies ist ja nur möglich, wenn der Geist das Ende des Körpers überdauert.
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The Ugly Values of Beautiful People
Pacific Standard: The beautiful are different from you and me. But not in the ways we think. That’s the conclusion of new research from Israel, which confirms the truism that we idealize attractive people, and suggests that—at least as far as women are concerned—the pedestal we place them on is largely unearned. “Despite the widely accepted ‘What is beautiful is good’ stereotype, our findings suggest that the beautiful strive for conformity rather than independence, and for self-promotion rather than tolerance,” writes a research team led by Lihi Segal-Caspi of the Open University of Israel.
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Study: More women winemakers are making names for themselves
The Washington Post: In 1978, the first vintage that Cathy Corison made wine, she could count on one hand the number of women she knew of doing the same kind of work in the cellars of the Napa Valley. Without using all her fingers. Nearly 35 years later, Corison needs a lot more fingers. Winemaking remains primarily a man’s world, but research by Santa Clara University professors Lucia Albino Gilbert and John Gilbert has found that nearly 10 percent of California wineries now have women as the main or lead winemaker. Their second finding: Women winemakers tend to be more highly acclaimed than their male counterparts. Why?
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What Makes Self-Directed Learning Effective?
In recent years, educators have come to focus more and more on the importance of lab-based experimentation, hands-on participation, student-led inquiry, and the use of “manipulables” in the classroom. The underlying rationale seems to be that students are better able to learn when they can control the flow of their experience, or when their learning is “self-directed.” While the benefits of self-directed learning are widely acknowledged, the reasons why a sense of control leads to better acquisition of material are poorly understood.
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Diss Information: Is There a Way to Stop Popular Falsehoods from Morphing into “Facts”?
Scientific American: A recurring red herring in the current presidential campaign is the verity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate. Although the president has made this document public, and records of his 1961 birth in Honolulu have been corroborated by newspaper announcements, a vocal segment of the population continues to insist that Obama's birth certificate proving U.S. citizenship is a fraud, making him legally ineligible to be president. A Politico survey found that a majority of voters in the 2011 Republican primary shared this clearly false belief. Scientific issues can be just as vulnerable to misinformation campaigns.
