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The Internet’s hidden science factory
PBS: In a small apartment in a small town in northeastern Mississippi, Sarah Marshall sits at her computer, clicking bubbles for an online survey, as her 1-year-old son plays nearby. She hasn’t done this exact survey before, but the questions are familiar, and she works fast. That’s because Marshall is what you might call a professional survey-taker. In the past five years, she has completed roughly 20,000 academic surveys. This is her 21st so far this week. And it’s only Tuesday. Marshall is a worker for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online job forum where “requesters” post jobs, and an army of crowdsourced workers complete them, earning fantastically small fees for each task.
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The Perils of Adolescence
Adolescence is a perilous time of life. It’s a time of heightened risk taking—reckless driving, risky sex, excessive drug and alcohol use. For decades the prevalent view—the common wisdom of parenting manuals—was that teenagers feel invulnerable, immortal. They simply perceive less peril in dicey situations, and believe they have much more control than they actually do. In short, they underestimate life’s very real risks and dangers. But scientists who study adolescent decision making now dispute this common parenting wisdom. Teenagers do indeed underestimate risk—sometimes—but at other times they overestimate how risky and harmful a situation is.
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Are Corporations People, Too? Your Brain Seems to Process Them That Way
According to rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court, corporations are people, at least when it comes to certain legal rights such as free speech. While corporations may be people in the eyes of the law, a team of psychological scientists recently investigated whether corporations also register as people in the brain. Researchers Mark Plitt, Ricky Savjani, and David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine utilized neuroimaging technology to determine whether people unconsciously perceive corporations as inanimate objects or as people. “Little is known about how our brains process information about collective units such as corporations,” the researchers write in the journal Social Neuroscience.
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Thinking of God Makes People Bigger Risk-Takers
Reminders of God can make people more likely to seek out and take risks, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that people are
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Simple Maze Test Could Help Identify Drivers’ Accident Risk
A simple 3-minute test may accurately identify older drivers who are at heightened risk of serious accidents because of cognitive decline.
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Right Brained, Wrong Brained: How Caltech Neuroscience Became a Buzzfeed Quiz
Los Angeles Magazine: Somewhere between art class and algebra, most of us learn—probably after struggling in one area and excelling in the other—which “side” of our brain is dominant. You are either left brained or right brained. (And if you are in doubt, you can turn to any number of online tests to peg your hemispheric tendencies once and for all.) Left brainers are supposed to be analytical, orderly, mathematical, and good with language. Right brainers tend to be more disorganized, creative, artistic, and visual. A test on BuzzFeed informs me that I’m right brained, though as a science writer, my background would suggest that I draw more from the left.
