-
Guys Have to Earn Their Status
ABC News: Me Tarzan. You Jane. Well, not necessarily, although the ape man was doing what comes naturally when he asserted his manhood on the lady from England. There are biological, as well as social, reasons why a man has to prove his manliness, and a woman does not. And a new effort to explain that difference between the genders concludes that the rights of passage for males at least partly explains why men are more aggressive than women. Manhood, according to psychologists Jennifer K. Bosson and Joseph A.
-
Brooks-Gunn, Ginsburg Elected To National Academy of Education
Teacher's College - Columbia University: Faculty members Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Herbert P. Ginsburg have been elected to the National Academy of Education (NAEd). They are among 11 education leaders who were elected to the Academy for their “pioneering efforts in education research and policy development,” the Academy announced. “The newly elected members are preeminent leaders in their respective areas of educational research, and they have had extraordinary impact on education in the U.S.,” said TC President Susan H. Fuhrman, who is also President of NAEd.
-
White Americans See Anti-White Bias on the Rise
The Wall Street Journal: Both white Americans and black Americans perceive significant progress in the fight against anti-black bias, but white Americans believe the progress has come at their expense, a new survey finds. The researchers contacted a random national sample of 209 whites and 208 blacks, and asked them how much discrimination each group faced, on a scale of one to ten, for each decade since the 1950s. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
-
Dusting for Fingerprints – It Ain’t CSI
Fingerprints – dozens of crime dramas revolve around them. The investigators find the victim, dust for fingerprints, run them through a computer program and -voilá- the guilty party is quickly identified and sent to prison. If only it were that easy. The reality is that this common but crucial part of an investigation is done by humans, not by computers. An upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveals that the human factor in the process could lead to errors and false convictions of innocent people.
-
Is Your Child a Brat? Use Rewards, Not Punishment
Big Think: The idea that punishment teaches a kid not to misbehave is a myth, pure and simple. Here are three steps for actually changing your kid's unpleasant behavior. Punishment--mild, severe, abusive--changes behavior only at the moment it is delivered. It doesn’t change the overall level or rate of the behavior. So if you have a child that is doing something horrible and you smack them, it’ll stop it for the moment, but it won’t decrease the number of times they do the horrible thing. Watch the video: Big Think
-
You’re Rubber, I’m Glue – How Can I Impress You?
Would you rather be a professor or his dependent student? We tend to think being a dependent person isn’t a good thing, but new research has found some positive aspects of dependency. An article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science explains that dependent people have a need to impress others, which leads to active, not passive, behavior. In one study, a dependent and non-dependent volunteer, as measured on a personality test, were paired up to debate an issue the researchers knew they didn’t agree on. Although the researchers expected the dependent person to give in, they found that 70 percent of the time it was actually the nondependent volunteer who gave in.
