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What Experts Know About Men Who Rape
He sat by his phone, skeptical that it would ring. “I didn’t think that anyone would want to respond,” said Samuel D. Smithyman, now 72 and a clinical psychologist in South Carolina. But the phone did ring. Nearly 200 times. ... Early studies relied heavily on convicted rapists. This skewed the data, said Neil Malamuth, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been studying sexual aggression for decades. Men in prison are often “generalists,” he said: “They would steal your television, your watch, your car.
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The Power of Pretending: What Would a Hero Do?
Sometime or other, almost all of us secretly worry that we’re just impostors—bumbling children masquerading as competent adults. Some of us may deal with challenges by pretending to be a fictional hero instead of our unimpressive selves. I vividly remember how channeling Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet got me through the awkwardness of teen courtship. But can you really fake it till you make it?
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What’s Normal?
After election day, “This is not normal” became a rallying cry for Donald Trump’s opponents: Harry Reid warned against press coverage that normalized the president-elect; a John Oliver monologue about Trump being abnormal won 14 million YouTube views; this is not normal T-shirts popped up around the country. But in July, after critics opined that his bullying tweets were “not normal,” Trump tweeted back that his social-media usage, far from deviant, was simply “MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL.” Maybe he’s hit on an uncomfortable truth: Even abhorrent things can become standard. Could his behavior become normal? ... Complicating matters, our sense of what’s ideal can be fickle.
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Are We Born Fearing Spiders and Snakes?
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Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?
The disintegration of Jake’s life took him by surprise. It happened early in his junior year of high school, while he was taking three Advanced Placement classes, running on his school’s cross-country team and traveling to Model United Nations conferences. It was a lot to handle, but Jake — the likable, hard-working oldest sibling in a suburban North Carolina family — was the kind of teenager who handled things. Though he was not prone to boastfulness, the fact was he had never really failed at anything. Not coincidentally, failure was one of Jake’s biggest fears. He worried about it privately; maybe he couldn’t keep up with his peers, maybe he wouldn’t succeed in life.
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People Who Value Virtue Show Wiser Reasoning
We’re often better at working through our friends’ problems than our own—but people who are motivated to develop the best in themselves and others don’t show this bias.
