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In Defense of Superstition
The New York Times: Superstition is typically a pejorative term. Belief in things like magic and miracles is thought to be irrational and scientifically retrograde. But as studies have repeatedly shown, some level of belief in the supernatural — often a subtle and unconscious belief — appears to be unavoidable, even among skeptics. One study found that a group of seemingly rational Princeton students nonetheless believed that they had influenced the Super Bowl just by watching it on TV. We are all mystics, to a degree. The good news is that superstitious thought, or “magical thinking,” even as it misrepresents reality, has its advantages.
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The Shaky Science of Online Dating
Businessweek: Ten years ago, online dating was seen as the last refuge of the desperate; today it’s mainstream enough that the worried parents of some of my unmarried friends urge them to keep their online profiles updated. Estimates vary, but tens of millions of Americans use sites like Match.com, PlentyOfFish.com, EHarmony, OKCupid, and Chemistry.com, along with niche dating sites like JDate (for Jewish singles), Gay.com, and SugarDaddie. A single person today doesn’t have to be content with whom they might meet at work or a party, or at church or the local bar.
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Older and Wiser?
The Economist: One stereotype of wisdom is a wizened Zen-master smiling benevolently at the antics of his pupils, while referring to them as little grasshoppers or some such affectation, safe in the knowledge that one day they, too, will have been set on the path that leads to wizened masterhood. But is it true that age brings wisdom? A study two years ago in North America, by Igor Grossmann of the University of Waterloo, in Canada, suggested that it is. In as much as it is possible to quantify wisdom, Dr Grossmann found that elderly Americans had more of it than youngsters.
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Taking Time for Others
The Wall Street Journal: Tired of feeling starved for time? Try spending it on someone else, says a new paper by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Harvard Business School and Yale School of Management. Cutting back on commitments is the usual response to feeling harried, but the new research—to be published in a coming issue of Psychological Science—found that people who donated time to others actually experienced feelings of "time affluence," a sense of having ample time to complete other tasks.
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Stephen Colbert, Scientific Pioneer
The Huffington Post: In my last post here, I explored what I called the science of "truthiness": How we can come to understand the denial of science, on issues like global warming, by examining the underlying psychology of political conservatism itself. But I must confess that in that item, I was relying on a fairly clichéd understanding of the word "truthiness." Since it was first coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005, the term has taken on a massive life of its own -- coming to mean, in its broadest sense, the problem of people making up their own reality, one just "truthy" enough that they actually believe it.
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A Psychologist Goes To The Zoo: An Interview with Terry L. Maple
Scientific American: I first became aware of Dr. Terry L. Maple when I read his article in the latest issue of The Observer, the magazine of the Association for Psychological Science. Maple is former president and CEO of the Zoo Atlanta as well as the Palm Beach Zoo, and is currently a professor in the departments of psychology and integrative biology at the Harriett Wilkes Honors College at the Boca Raton campus of Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Maple became the Director of the Atlanta Zoo in 1984 at the request of then-Mayor Andrew Young.
