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Human Nature’s Pathologist
The New York Times: Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve. Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.” At the dinner table, he argued with his parents about human nature. “They said, ‘What would happen if there were no police?’ ” he recalled. “I said: ‘What would we do? Would we rob banks? Of course not. Police make no difference.’ ” This was in Montreal, “a city that prided itself on civility and low rates of crime,” he said. Then, on Oct.
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Hand Washing: A Deadly Dilemma
New Yorker essayist Atul Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a prestigious teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. A couple years ago, he wrote a profile of his hospital’s infection-control team, whose full-time job it is to control the spread of infectious disease in the hospital. The focus of the piece was hand washing—or more accurately, the team’s failed efforts to get doctors, nurses and others in patient care to adequately disinfect their hands. They tried everything. They repositioned sinks, and had new, automated ones installed. They bought $5000 “precaution carts” to make washing, gloving and gowning easy and efficient.
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Blame My Doorway For Senior Moments
Huffington Post: I regularly walk into my kitchen and open a drawer, only to forget what I am looking for. I walk into our laundry room to claim some clean socks, only to forget what it was I needed. When I call for the dog, my kid's name sometimes comes out of my mouth. And as much as I dislike Rick Perry, I totally got how he couldn't remember the third federal department he plans on eliminating if we elect him President. Now finally, we have something to blame for those unfortunately named "senior moments." It's the doorway. New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky says that the act of passing through a doorway causes memory lapses.
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Impatient People Have Lower Credit Scores
Is there a psychological reason why people default on their mortgages? A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people with bad credit scores are more impatient – more likely to choose immediate rewards rather than wait for a larger reward later. The new paper is by two economists who were working at the Federal Reserve’s Center for Behavioral Economics and Decisionmaking in Boston at the time they did the research. People at the Fed are very interested in understanding how the default crisis came about.
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Holiday hype is like sex, you have to get in the mood
The Globe and Mail: I’m beginning to believe in the Ho Ho Hump – that point in the preholiday hype when one gives in and embraces the festive season. I’m convinced that there is such a thing. It’s just that some canny retailer has yet to devise an annoying ad campaign about it. (There’s always time – just under four weeks to be exact – so don’t feel too relieved. Yet.) You succumb to the tinsel brigade. You can hear the jingles in Canadian Tire and not want to head directly for the exit. You can look at those SUVs with the wreath strapped to the front grill and the perky soccer mom at the wheel, and not wearily sigh at the in-your-face (and in your rearview mirror) gung-ho-ness of mirth.
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Creative Thinkers More Likely to Cheat
LiveScience: When it comes t0 money, creative people are more likely to cheat to get it than the less-imaginative crowd, a new study suggests. The reason? Creative types may be more skilled at coming up with reasons for their less-than-ethical actions, according to the researchers. In the new study, scientists measured the intelligence and creativity of 97 students from local universities in the southeastern United States by asking them to complete a series of recognized psychological tests. Read the whole story: LiveScience
