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Most, Least Honest Cities: Where Are People Most Likely to Return a Lost Wallet?
ABC's Good Morning America: Don't drop your wallet in Lisbon: That's one finding from an experiment designed by Reader's Digest to test the honesty of people in 16 major cities worldwide. Of a dozen wallets dropped in Lisbon, only one was returned. Go ahead, though, and lose your wallet in Helsinki: There 11 of out 12 lost wallets were returned. In the experiment, Digest reporters deliberately dropped a total of 192 wallets in 16 cities in Europe, Asia and North and South America. Each one contained a cell phone number, a family photo, business cards and $50 U.S. (or the local equivalent).
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Science Asks: Who’s More Pig-Headed, Dems or Republicans?
TIME: Forget the ancient Greeks’ advice. In this political climate, it’s more like “nothing in moderation, everything in excess.” Frank Bruni’s column in Monday’s New York Times highlights some of the cable-TV hyperbole that seems to plague our political discussions these days by asking whether all the Nazi metaphors and lynching references have in fact pulled the right and the left further apart, making compromise impossible. “When nuance and perspective exit the language, do they exit the conversation as well?” he wrote. ”When you speak in ludicrous extremes, do you think that way, too? According to science, yes. ...
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New Research on Genetics and Intelligence
Read about the latest research on genetics and intelligence: Literacy and Numeracy Are More Heritable Than Intelligence in Primary School Yulia Kovas, Ivan Voronin, Andrey Kaydalov, Sergey B. Malykh, Philip S. Dale, and Robert Plomin Are literacy and numeracy less heritable than general cognitive ability? Monozygotic and dizygotic twins were assessed for literacy, numeracy, and general cognitive ability at ages 7, 9, and 12. Literacy and numeracy were found to be more heritable than general cognitive ability at ages 7 and 9 but not at age 12.
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Shutdown Science: Furloughed Workers Feel the Burden of Boredom
LiveScience: Jennifer Wade is bored. A program director for the National Science Foundation, Wade normally spends her workdays managing grant proposals and wrangling the reviewers who will decide what research gets federal funding. But with the federal government shutdown pending a Congressional budget agreement, Wade is stuck at home — and she's not enjoying it. "I think nine days is the length of time it takes for anxiety to dissipate, anger to move to a background steady state, and boredom to just take over," Wade told LiveScience. "I literally paced, a little bit ago, to keep myself from lying on the couch. Now I'm walking to get a coffee just to give myself something to do." ...
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‘Belief superiority’: A reason for the political impasse?
The Washington Post: As we enter the second week of the government shutdown with legislators unwilling to reach across the aisle to find a compromise, it seems appropriate that a study on extreme political views and “belief superiority” has been published in a scholarly journal. The results are no surprise: People holding the most extreme views are the ones who are the most convinced they’re not only correct, but that the rest of the world is wrong. That holds true for both liberals and conservatives on the far ends of the political spectrum.
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We identify people by their body, when face is no help
The Telegraph: When trying to recognise someone from far away or when their face is obscured, the brain uses information from a person's body size and shape to figure out who it is. Scientists had previously thought recognition relied solely on facial features but the latest discovery found that working out who someone is from far away relies on other physical cues. The finding could have implications for security and law enforcement, who currently rely on facial features for recognising people. Researcher Allyson Rice said: "Psychologists and computer scientists have concentrated almost exclusively on the role of the face in person recognition.
