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Grading The Online Dating Industry
New Scientific Report Finds Some Positives, Many Areas for Improvement The report card is in, and the online dating industry won't be putting this one on the fridge. A new scientific report concludes that although online dating offers users some very real benefits, it falls far short of its potential. Unheard of just twenty years ago, online dating is now a billion dollar industry and one of the most common ways for singles to meet potential partners. Many websites claim that they can help you find your “soulmate.” But do these online dating services live up to all the hype?
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Psicologia: Facebook insidia per chi ha scarsa autostima
Yahoo Italia: Facebook è per molti, ma non per tutti. Il social network dei record, infatti, è controindicato per le persone con scarsa autostima. Secondo uno studio pubblicato su 'Psychological Science', infatti, questo tipo di cybernauti finisce per bombardare gli amici online con messaggi negativi sulla propria vita, rendendosi sgradevole senza rendersene conto. "Pensavamo che Facebook potesse essere un posto fantastico per le persone, uno spazio per rafforzare le relazioni", spiega Amanda Forest dell'University of Waterloo, coautrice della ricerca insieme a Joanne Woo. Anche perché "chi soffre di scarsa autostima spesso è a disagio nelle relazioni faccia a faccia", spiega.
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Right Hand or Left? How the Brain Solves a Perceptual Puzzle
When you see a picture of a hand, how do you know whether it’s a right or left hand? This “hand laterality” problem may seem obscure, but it reveals a lot about how the brain sorts out confusing perceptions. Now, a study which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, challenges the long-held consensus about how we solve this problem. “For decades, the theory was that you use your motor imagination,” says Shivakumar Viswanathan, who conducted the study with University of California Santa Barbara colleagues Courtney Fritz and Scott T. Grafton.
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Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds
The Guardian: Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires. They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media. A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of Würtzburg is the first to monitor such responses "in the wild" outside a laboratory. Read the full story: The Guardian
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Irreconcilable differences links
Boston Globe: Additional reading (and listening) on the "irreconcilable differences" of politics, football, and Tweet seats, for those who are interested. This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education explores the research of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt (pronounced like "height") made his name arguing that intuition, not reason, drives moral judgments. People are more like lawyers building a case for their gut feelings than judges reasoning toward truth. How much of moral thinking is innate? Haidt sees morality as a "social construction" that varies by time and place.
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Old and on the Road: Can We Train Elderly Drivers To Be Safer?
Mr. Magoo, a cartoon regular of early TV, was notorious for his hazardous driving. He was a retiree, befuddled and extremely nearsighted, yet he continued to drive despite these obvious failings. In the opening sequence to his long-running show, he has run-ins with a railroad train, a haystack and several barn animals, a roller coaster, a fire hydrant, a mud hole and a high voltage line—all while honking his horn and shouting “Road hog!” Looking back, it seems like a cruel stereotype of the elderly, especially elderly drivers. But like all stereotypes, the Mr. Magoo caricature had a bit of truth to it.
