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Why We Love the Pain of Spicy Food
The Wall Street Journal: As winter settles in and temperatures plunge, people turn to food and drink to provide a little warmth and comfort. In recent years, an unconventional type of warmth has elbowed its way onto more menus: the bite of chili peppers, whether from the red jalapeños of Sriracha sauce, dolloped on tacos or Vietnamese noodles, or from the dried ancho or cayenne peppers that give a bracing kick to Mayan hot chocolate. But the chili sensation isn’t just warm: It hurts! It is a form of pain and irritation. There’s no obvious biological reason why humans should tolerate it, let alone seek it out and enjoy it.
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What I Learned About Dogs and Love While Crossing the Country With My Lab
Slate: Casey and I stopped in Sarasota, Florida, to meet Cary, a woman who’d read about my journey and suggested that I come meet her black Lab, Pepe. I told her and her husband, Mike, about Piper, a dog I was going to meet that afternoon in Tampa. Piper had bitten a home intruder two years prior, only to have the robber stab her with a crowbar. “Poor dog,” Cary said. “If someone stabbed my dog, that would be like someone stabbing my child. To me, my pets are like my children. I love them the same.” Although I adore dogs, I’m surprised when I hear people equate their love for their pets with their love for their kids.
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The psychology of why little kids are completely obsessed with ‘Frozen’
The Washington Post: When the animated film “Frozen” was released last year, no one expected it to become a worldwide juggernaut. “Frozen,” which earned more than $1.2 billion at the box office, is not only the first “princess” movie to make the list of top 10 grossing animated films. Even more astonishingly, it is also the No. 1 animated film of all time. Talk about shattering the glass ceiling, or in this case, the glass slipper.
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Attitudes About Who Brings Home the Bacon Lag Behind Economic Reality
A team of psychological scientists hypothesized that people’s deep-rooted beliefs about gender roles may be slower to change than the major behavioral shifts evidenced within society and the workforce.
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Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions
The New York Times: The deaths of African-Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Cleveland and on Staten Island have reignited a debate about race. Some argue that these events are isolated and that racism is a thing of the past. Others contend that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, highlighting that skin color still has a huge effect on how people are treated. Arguments about race are often heated and anecdotal. As a social scientist, I naturally turn to empirical research for answers.
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Surprise!
Slate: If I could ensure that kids come away from science class with one thing only, it wouldn’t be a set of facts. It would be an attitude—something that the late physicist Richard Feynman called “scientific integrity,” the willingness to bend over backward to examine reasons your pet theories about the world might be wrong. “That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school,” Feynman said in a 1974 commencement speech. “We never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation.” ... In other words, we need to actively look for signs that our assumptions are wrong, because we won’t do so unprompted.
