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Killer’s DNA Won’t Explain His Crime
NPR: Connecticut's chief medical examiner, Wayne Carver, has raised the possibility of requesting genetic tests on Adam Lanza, the man responsible for the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Carver hasn't said precisely what he may want geneticists to look for, but scientists who study the links between genes and violence say those tests won't reveal much about why Lanza did what he did. Ellen Wright Clayton, a specialist in law and genetics at Vanderbilt University, says there aren't many possibilities. "The only thing they can be looking for here is to see whether the killer had certain genetic variants that may predispose to mental illness or to violence," she says.
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How to Make New Year’s Resolutions Stick: Q&A with an Expert on Change
TIME: It’s time to set goals for the coming year, and a psychologist has some hints for helping you to make those changes last. John Norcross, a professor of psychology at the University of Scranton, is one of the world’s leading experts on how people change addictive behaviors. Over the past 30 years, he and his colleagues have studied people who successfully quit smoking, cut back or quit heavy drinking, lost weight or started exercising regularly — including those whose lasting change began with a resolution to start on Jan. 1. He outlined some of his strategies in his new book, Changeology, and discussed how to make resolutions work. Read the whole story: TIME
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Psychology of Compromise: Why Congress Fails
LiveScience: Hyenas do it. Elephants do it. But apparently congressional representatives do not. "It" would be cooperation, which has been little-seen in Washington during the "fiscal cliff" negotiations. Despite a deadline they themselves set with consequences no one wanted, Democrats and Republicans went down to the wire before passing a bill that averts major cuts and tax increases but sets the stage for more bickering over the raising of the nation's debt limit and other budgetary issues. ... With few aisle-crossing congressional representatives around, it's no wonder the two sides rarely see eye-to-eye. But negotiation is tough even without the extra complication of politics.
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Why Do People Go Nuts on New Year’s Eve?
U.S. News & World Report: True story. Last year, I went to a New Year's Eve party based on the following facts: It was being held at a very cool coffeehouse and geared toward an older crowd. By older, I mean not 20somethings, who I'd considered the rowdiest of revelers. And by coffeehouse, well, it seemed an unlikely site to teem with drunk crowds of 20somethings. In my mind, that combo created the possibility for a dignified New Year's celebration, one in which people weren't humping each other in plain view and vomiting. Hopefully, not at the same time. I know I sound like a New Year's Eve scrooge, but my definition of not fun definitely includes crowds of vomiting humpers. ...
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Racial Essentialism Reduces Creative Thinking By Making People More Closed-Minded
New research suggests that racial stereotypes and creativity have more in common than we might think. In an article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researcher Carmit Tadmor of Tel Aviv University and colleagues find that racial stereotyping and creative stagnation share a common mechanism: categorical thinking. “Although these two concepts concern very different outcomes, they both occur when people fixate on existing category information and conventional mindsets,” Tadmor and her colleagues write.
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College Costs: Would Tuition Discounts Get More Students to Major in Science?
TIME: How much money would it take to get an English major to switch to engineering? Would a $1,000 discount on tuition every year do the trick? What about $5,000? What if switching majors not only reduced students’ debt load but also made it much more likely that they would find a job after graduation? Would that be enough to change their mind? Cheaper tuition might motivate some students to tough it out, but Timothy Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, urges schools and policymakers to proceed with caution.
