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Revisiting the ‘hormone of love’
It’s been more than a decade since oxytocin was first heralded as the “hormone of love”—a distinction that came with optimistic predictions for future drug therapies. It was just a matter of time before an oxytocin nasal spray would be available on pharmacy shelves, with the potential to cure shyness and dampen anxiety and, perhaps, even treat the social deficits of autism. The excitement was not confined to the popular press. The early animal studies, which showed a link between oxytocin and sociability, generated considerable interest in scientific circles as well, and indeed led to a decade of intense study of the hormone.
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Uncommon Sense: Toward an RQ Test?
The Huffington Post: We all know people who are highly intelligent but not very smart. These people get good grades in school, ace a lot of tests, and often succeed professionally. But they nevertheless hold irrational beliefs and do a lot of foolish things. Such people almost certainly have high IQs, but IQ scores do not reflect their particular form of cognitive deficit. Indeed, these people seem to be unable to think and act rationally despite their high intelligence. University of Toronto psychological scientist Keith Stanovich has a name for this disability. He calls it "dysrationalia," and he has spent the last several years trying to define the nature of this common deficit.
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Why You Like What You Like
Smithsonian Magazine: For most of us, a pickle is a pickle. It is something that rests snugly beside a sandwich, or floats in a jar on a deli counter. It is rarely something that occasions cryptographic analysis. A number of years ago, though, Howard Moskowitz, a Harvard-trained psychophysicist and food industry consultant, was asked by Vlasic Pickles to crack “the pickle code.” Losing market share to Claussen, the Vlasic executives wanted to take a hard look at a question that was, surprisingly, rarely asked: What kind of pickles did people really want?
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How Our Brains Miss the Obvious
Discovery News: In the house of alleged Cleveland kidnapper Ariel Castro, multiple padlocks kept interior doors shut, windows were nailed shut, and guests weren't allowed upstairs or in the basement. In retrospect, some question why visitors didn't notice that something was amiss over the 10 years that three women were allegedly held captive there before their recent escape. But psychologists say few people would: We are so focused on the task on hand that it's easy to miss aberrant details.
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When paying more stops paying off
The Washington Post: Everyone likes money. Ask people who say they don’t care about money if they’ve ever turned down a raise. Wait for the awkward pause. But money is funny, too. However much it can motivate people to work harder and better, it also has curious—and sometimes counterproductive—effects on their performance. A growing body of research shows that, in some cases, paying people more not only fails to change their behavior but actually makes them perform even worse. Money can be a surprisingly poor incentive.
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The New (Malevolent) Ageism
The Huffington Post: America is a rapidly graying society. This demographic trend has been underway for a while -- and anticipated for a long while -- yet some of its implications are just now coming into focus. Most notably, the aging of America will almost certainly trigger a retirement crisis, with elderly boomers competing for limited financial and medical resources -- and working longer just to stay afloat. The elderly have never been honored in American society. They have more often been stereotyped, stigmatized and pitied as outdated and weak, both physically and mentally.
