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The moral climate
National Post: The 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that begins this week in Durban isn't expected to see much progress in replacing Kyoto. For those who believe that the Kyoto process is politically dangerous, economically destructive and based on dubious science, this is a good thing. Nevertheless, there is bound to be plenty of hand-wringing over the failure of rich countries to hand over more cash to poor ones as "compensation" for the climate catastrophe to come.
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A Vaccination Against Social Prejudice
Evolutionary psychologists suspect that prejudice is rooted in survival: Our distant ancestors had to avoid outsiders who might have carried disease. Research still shows that when people feel vulnerable to illness, they exhibit more bias toward stigmatized groups. But a new study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science suggests there might be a modern way to break that link. “We thought if we could alleviate concerns about disease, we could also alleviate the prejudice that arises from them,” says Julie Y. Huang of the University of Toronto, about a study she conducted with Alexandra Sedlovskaya of Harvard University; Joshua M.
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Why Do We Give? Not Why Or How You Think
NPR: New findings in the science of charity reveals some counter-intuitive results. For instance, people will give more money to a single suffering person than to a population of suffering people, and also give more when some type of physical discomfort — for example, running a marathon — is involved. GUY RAZ, HOST: This time of year, pleas for donations are as plentiful as eggnog and door-buster sales. Americans give around $300 billion a year to charity. And as NPR's Alix Spiegel reports, psychologists have started to look more closely at when and why we're motivated to give.
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Chicken Soup for the Lonely Soul: Why Comfort Food Works
Scientific American: My grandmother was born in Sobrance, in what was then called Czechoslovakia on November 5, 1930. She grew up in ten kilometers away, in a small town called Nagy-Muzsaly. Her father’s family were landowners, something that was very rare for Jewish families at the time, and they used that land to produce wine. My grandmother’s family led simple lives. All that changed, though, when my grandmother was 13 years old. On the last day of Passover in 1944, my grandmother and her family were first deported by the Nazis.
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The lies we email each other
msnbc: Wondering if that fabulous man you've been chatting with online is really a mountain-climbing astronaut fluent in six languages, including Latin? According to a new study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, chances are he's simply one of the many people who can't help stretching the truth when they hit the keyboard. "I wouldn't say that human beings are a big pack of liars," says Robert S. Feldman, professor of psychology and dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "But I would say that it's very easy to lie." This is especially true when we go online, according to Feldman's research.
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‘Redirect’ by Timothy D. Wilson and ‘Who’s in charge?’ by Michael S. Gazzaniga
The Boston Globe: Common sense has a lot to say about human behavior and the human brain. Recent empirical research, though, strongly suggests that a good deal of what it has to say is wrong. This is both unfortunate and serious, since many of the practices and policies we choose as a society are based on our beliefs about human behavior and how to change it. Two new books from eminent brain researchers aim to apply these recent findings to questions of behavior, free will, and responsibility. In “Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change,’’ Timothy D.
