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What Choice Do We Have?
Too much choice can be a bad thing—not just for the individual, but for society. Thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people, according to a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In the U.S., important policy debates are often framed in terms of choice, such as whether people get to choose their own healthcare plan and a school for their children. "When Hurricane Katrina happened, people asked, why did those people choose to stay?" says Krishna Savani of Columbia University.
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Parents and Science: When Desires Trump Data
Many young couples face some version of this dilemma today: They’ve decided they want to have children in the near future—they’re not on the fence about that—but the financial reality is that they both have to work. They need both their earnings, not for a fancy lifestyle but just to pay the bills and save a bit. So when the day comes that they do become parents, they will almost certainly have to send their young child to some kind of day care, so that they both can continue to work. That’s their world. But in their hearts they believe that children are better off raised at home, by a stay-at-home parent.
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Hot Days Turn Pitchers Into Hot Heads
U.S. News & World Report: Baseball pitchers intentionally "bean" more batters in retaliation during hot weather, finds a new study. Researchers analyzed data from more than 57,000 Major League baseball games from 1952 through 2009 and found that pitchers whose teammates were hit by a pitch were more likely to nail an opposing batter when the temperature reached 90 degrees F than on cooler days. If the temperatures were in the 50s during a game, there was a 22 percent chance a pitcher would hit a batter if a teammate had been hit by a pitch during the first inning. But the likelihood of such retribution increased to 27 percent if temperatures were in the 90s. Read the whole story: U.S.
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Study Examines Difference Between Abstract Expressionist Masterpieces And Paintings By Children
The Huffington Post: How often have you heard people describe artworks by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko or Cy Twombly as drawings that a 5-year-old child could have made? The answer is probably, very often. But is this true? Can children produce art whose perceived quality, as least by widespread artistic circles, matches that of renowned artists who sell their art for millions of dollars? Boston College psychologists Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner's research, recently published in the journal Psychological Science, seeks to answer this question.
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Study Highlights How Moms’ Depression, Anger Stresses Kids
Bloomberg: Even very young children can get stressed by depressed parents who display negative emotions toward them, researchers confirm. The new study included 3-year-old children who were subjected to different harmless, but stress-inducing, situations, such as causing them to become slightly nervous or frustrated. After each stressful event, saliva samples were taken from the children to measure levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The researchers also observed the interaction between children and their parents -- usually the mother -- as they did a task together or as the parent read a book to the child. Read the whole story: Bloomberg
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Formula for a Truly Funny April Fools
Want the recipe for pranks that will have guaranteed laughs on April fool’s day? A study published in Psychological Science found jokes that involve moral or norm violations are funnier but only when the moral violation seems benign, so the audience has psychological distance from it. Check out this video by the Pocket Scientist, George Zaidan, summarizing the study: In one experiment, volunteers were asked read pairs of situations, one of which had a moral violation (e.g. a rabbi promoting pork) while the other did not. The situation with the moral violation was more likely to make the reader laugh.
