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The Life Scientific
BBC Radio 4: Professor Robert Plomin talks to Jim Al-Khalili about what makes some people smarter than others and why he's fed up with the genetics of intelligence being ignored. Born and raised in Chicago, Robert sat countless intelligence tests at his inner city Catholic school. College was an attractive option mainly because it seemed to pay well. Now he's one of the most cited psychologists in the world. He specialized in behavioural genetics in the mid seventies when the focus in mainstream psychology was very much on our nurture rather than our nature, and genetics was virtually taboo. Read the whole story: BBC Radio 4
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This Is Why You Feel So Sad on Sunday (and How to Fix It)
Real Simple: Even after the best of weekends (or especially after the best of weekends), there’s a cloud that descends. Chances are, you’ve felt it. In a 2013 poll from the career site Monster.com, 81 percent of American respondents said they get Sunday-night blues—and 59 percent said they experience them “really bad.” As laid-back “weekend you” begins to morph into uptight “weekday you,” anxiety over anticipating an overflowing in-box, the drudgery of packing school lunches, and the tyranny of a mile-long to-do list sets in. ... Homework is yet another Sunday downer. Nagging kids to hit the books creates an angst-filled evening.
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People Don’t Actually Want Equality
The Atlantic: People might be troubled by what they see as unjust causes of economic inequality, a perfectly reasonable concern given how much your income and wealth are determined by accidents of birth, including how much money your parents had, your sex, and the color of your skin. We are troubled as well by potential consequences of economic inequality. We may think it corrodes democracy, or increases crime, or diminishes overall happiness. Most of all, people worry about poverty—not that some have less, but rather “that those with less have too little.” ... The primatologist Frans de Waal sums up a popular view when he writes: “Robin Hood had it right.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Rethinking Suicide Surveillance: Google Search Data and Self-Reported Suicidality Differentially Estimate Completed Suicide Risk Christine Ma-Kellams, Flora Or, Ji Hyun Baek, and Ichiro Kawachi Google search information is increasingly used by researchers to study public health behavior, but how do data collected from Google compare with more traditional measures of health? The researchers analyzed suicide-related search terms entered into Google between 2008 and 2009 from all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, comparing them with questions related to suicidal thoughts and behaviors taken from the U.S.
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How the Internet Has Changed Bullying
The New Yorker: In some ways, bullying research has affirmed what we already know. Bullying is the result of an unequal power dynamic—the strong attacking the weak. It can happen in different ways: through physical violence, verbal abuse (in person or online), or the management of relationships (spreading rumors, humiliation, and exclusion). It is usually prolonged (most bullies are repeat offenders) and widespread (a bully targets multiple victims). Longitudinal work shows that bullies and victims can switch places: there is an entire category of bully-victims—people who are victims in one set of circumstances and perpetrators in another.
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The Psychological Case Against Tipping
New York Magazine: Welcome to the weirdness of tipping in America. It carries with it such a strong psychological pull that many consumers are unwilling to abandon it, and in light of recent estimates that 58 percent of a server’s income comes from tips, it seems as though there are considerable economic issues to untangle before many others follow Meyer's lead. The basic idea behind tipping, of course, is that service workers are getting rewarded for doing a good job, but the science simply doesn't back this up. There's decades’ worth of consumer-psychology research demonstrating that tipping hardly improves service at all.
