-
Why Facts Don’t Unify Us
The New York Times: According to the Pew Research Center, the nation is more polarized than at any time in recent history. While some of the issues dividing us boil down to ideology and preference, there is at least one on which hard science should have a strong say — climate change. But do numbers and figures change people’s opinions? Apparently, they do — they result in a deeper divide.
-
Why Do We Judge Parents For Putting Kids At Perceived — But Unreal — Risk?
NPR: Many parents who grew up playing outdoors with friends, walking alone to the park or to school, and enjoying other moments of independent play are now raising children in a world with very different norms. In the United States today, leaving children unsupervised is grounds for moral outrage and can lead to criminal charges. What's changed? ... This may seem to get things the wrong way around, but it's supported by new research available Tuesday in the open access journal Collabra.
-
The One Important Thing Missing From the Health Care Debate
Fortune: You may have seen the big news on health care: Aetna is going to stop offering individual health insurance policies on the health exchanges in 11 of the 15 states where it operates. Aetna AET -0.39% follows the lead of another large health insurer, United Health UNH -0.59% , which announced in April that it was withdrawing from almost all of the health insurance marketplaces where it operated. ... Language matters. Language focuses people’s attention. What senior managers talk about affects what their subordinates measure and emphasize, in the quest for leaders’ approval and individual career success.
-
Like Humans, Chimps Reward Cooperation and Punish Freeloaders
Scientific American: Although humans love the playful ways and toothy grins of chimpanzees, our primate cousins have the reputation of being competitive, churlish and, at times, aggressive. New research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that despite being prone to occasional violent behavior, chimps actually much prefer cooperating over competing. In fact, the work shows that chimps work together at similar rates as humans—and that when violence does occur among apes, it is often directed toward an individual that is not being a team player. Read the whole story: Scientific American
-
Teens Who Say No to Social Media
The Wall Street Journal: When 14-year-old Brian O’Neill of Washington, D.C., wanted to find out what his friends had been up to over summer vacation, he did something radical: He asked them. Unlike most kids his age, Brian isn’t on social media. He doesn’t scroll through his friends’ Instagram shots or post his own, nor does he use Facebook or Snapchat. “I don’t need social media to stay in touch,” he says. ... In a study published this spring in the journal Psychological Science, researchers created an Instagram-like program and then used fMRI scans to measure teens’ reactions to the photos that received more or fewer likes.
-
What a Bad Decision Looks Like in the Brain
The Atlantic: Humans often make bad decisions. If you like Snickers more than Milky Way, it seems obvious which candy bar you’d pick, given a choice of the two. Traditional economic models follow this logical intuition, suggesting that people assign a value to each choice — say, Snickers: 10, Milky Way: 5 — and select the top scorer. But our decision-making system is subject to glitches. In one recent experiment, Paul Glimcher, a neuroscientist at New York University, and collaborators asked people to choose among a variety of candy bars, including their favorite — say, a Snickers. If offered a Snickers, a Milky Way and an Almond Joy, participants would always choose the Snickers.
