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Empathy and torture
The Economist: EMPATHY is often confused with sympathy in Washington and derided as a trait of bleeding-heart liberals. But whereas sympathy can be uninformed—"I could never imagine what she is going through"—empathy is the ability to identify with the experiences and feelings of another person. And, in general, we humans are pretty bad at it. Study after study has shown what has come to be known as an "empathy gap" in people. In its simplest form, this means that when we are happy we have trouble identifying with someone who is sad, or when we're angry we have difficulty understanding why someone is content.
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Culture Influences Judgment of Others
LiveScience: European Americans are more likely than Asian-Americans to judge an individual's personality based on behaviors, such as presuming someone who, say, won't touch a door handle is neurotic, a new study suggests. The key is cultural, according to the researchers. European American culture emphasizes individual independence; meanwhile, Asian culture is more interdependent and more sensitive to social contexts. This difference means European Americans are inclined to account for someone's behavior by making assumptions about their personality, while Asians are not (at least not without some context), according to the researchers.
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How People Lose 100 Pounds
I am in awe of people who make a decision to lose a huge amount of weight—75 pounds, 100, even more—and then do it. I’m not talking about The Biggest Loser contestants, who do it for money and fame. I mean those who, privately and without fanfare, commit themselves to diet and exercise, set a distant goal, and then slowly chip away—one difficult pound after another difficult pound after another. The payoff is so far away. How do they stay motivated for the long haul? How do they even get started? Classical theories of motivation fail to explain such long-range commitment.
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Are Your Values Right or Left? The Answer Is More Literal Than You Think
Up equals good, happy, optimistic; down the opposite. Right is honest and trustworthy. Left, not so much. That’s what language and culture tell us. “We use mental metaphors to structure our thinking about abstract things,” says psychologist Daniel Casasanto, “One of those metaphors is space.” But we don’t all think right is right, Casasanto has found. Rather, “people associate goodness with the side they can act more fluently on.” Right-handed people prefer the product, job applicant, or extraterrestrial positioned to their right. Lefties march to a left-handed drummer. And those linguistic tropes?
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Torture – Too Severe for Empathy
An interrogation practice is classified as torture when it inflicts severe physical or mental pain. But the people who determine what defines severity aren’t experiencing that pain so they underestimate it. A study in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science found support for the empathy gap, a psychological phenomenon in which people in one emotional state cannot appreciate or predict the state of another who is distressed and in pain. To someone who is full, starvation doesn’t seem that bad.
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Care About Climate? Wearing a Coat Today?
Discovery News: Opinions about climate may be as fickle as the winds. A simple shift in temperature and Columbia University social scientists found that opinions about future climate trends changed accordingly. In surveys of 1,200 people in the U.S. and Australia, many who thought the day was unusually warm were more likely to be concerned about global warming than they were on days they thought were unusually cold. "I'm not sure I'd say that people are manipulated by the weather," lead author Ye Li said in a press release by Columbia. "But for some percentage of people, it's certainly pushing them around." Read the whole story: Discovery News
