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High Earnings Can Hamper Happiness
Behavioral experiments suggest that the modern drive to amass wealth is a holdover from the days when people sought to accumulate resources not for the sake of happiness, but for sheer survival.
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Bias in the Court
Pacific Standard: On November 14, 1978, a Texas jury found Thomas Barefoot guilty of the murder of Bell County police officer Carl Levin. Based on the gravity of the crime and the testimony of two psychiatrists who claimed that Barefoot would pose a continued menace to society, that same jury recommended the death penalty. Barefoot appealed. The psychiatrists, he argued, had no grounds on which to predict his future dangerousness. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which rejected his claim, affirming the merit of the mental health experts and denying a stay of execution. On October 30, 1984, Barefoot was put to death by lethal injection. ...
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Can Science Show Us Secrets Of Making Better Decisions?
The Huffington Post Day in and day out, we make decisions--some tough, some trivial, some good, some bad. And as Yale University neurobiologist Dr. Daeyeol Lee told The Huffington Post in an email, "poor decision-making in many domains, including finance, family, and health can all dramatically affect our well-being." What's really going on in our brains as we make decisions? Are there steps we can take to become better decision-makers? For answers to these and other questions, HuffPost Science turned to Dr. Lee, a professor of neurobiology and psychology at Yale and director of the university's laboratory of cognition and decision-making. Read the whole story: The Huffington Post
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The New Science of Mind
The New York Times: These days it is easy to get irritated with the exaggerated interpretations of brain imaging — for example, that a single fMRI scan can reveal our innermost feelings — and with inflated claims about our understanding of the biological basis of our higher mental processes. Such irritation has led a number of thoughtful people to declare that we can never achieve a truly sophisticated understanding of the biological foundation of complex mental activity.
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Hard-Wired for Giving
The Wall Street Journal: The Darwinian principle of "survival of the fittest" echoes what many people believe about life: To get ahead, you need to look out for No. 1. A cursory read of evolutionary doctrine suggests that the selfish individuals able to outcompete others for the best mates and the most resources are most likely to pass their genes on to the next generation. Then there is classical economic theory, which holds that given the choice, we will often opt for a personal benefit over a personal loss, even if that loss involves a benefit to someone else.
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Poverty strains cognitive abilities, opening door for bad decision-making, new study finds
The Washington Post: Poverty consumes so much mental energy that people struggling to make ends meet often have little brainpower left for anything else, leaving them more susceptible to bad decisions that can perpetuate their situation, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. “Past research has often blamed [poverty] on the personal failings of the poor. They don’t work hard enough; they’re not focused enough,” said University of British Columbia professor Jiaying Zhao, who co-authored the study as a Princeton University graduate student. “What we’re arguing is it’s not about the individual. It’s about the situation.” Read the whole story: The Washington Post
