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Breast-feeding mums more likely to aggressively defend their baby than bottle milk users
The Daily Mirror: Mothers who breast feed are more likely to act like “mama bears” – aggressively protecting their babies when threatened – than those who use bottles. And they have lower blood pressures than other women when riled, which suggests feeding a child naturally may make them braver, researchers found.
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Daily check up: Handwashing, a sympathetic act
The Boston Globe: A study in Psychological Science suggests that, to get doctors to wash their hands more regularly, hospitals could appeal to their sympathies, changing the message from “wash your hands to protect yourself” to “wash your hands to protect your patients.” The study compared the effectiveness of those slogans when posted in hospitals. The patient-focused sign was associated with a 33 percent increase in the use of soap and disinfectant over two weeks, Anahad O’Connor reports on the New York Times Well blog. Read the full story: The Boston Globe
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Stanley Milgram taught us we have more to fear from zealots than zombies
The Guardian: If you were a reporter instructed by your editor to hack into a grieving parent's phone, would you do it? If you were a Syrian soldier ordered to fire on unarmed protesters, would you obey? What if you were asked by a white-coated scientist to deliver lethal electric shocks as part of an experiment? Your answer to all of these questions will undoubtedly be "no" – or at least, "I hope not". Certainly when Stanley Milgram put the last question to 110 Americans — psychiatrists, students and middle-class adults — all of them insisted that they would defy anyone in authority who asked them to do such a terrible thing. But Milgram was not satisfied with this answer.
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The Check-Up: Wash Your Hands, Doc
Philadelphia Magazine: In the department of “things I wish I hadn’t read”: “Compliance rates for hand washing in American hospitals are only around 40 percent.” Geez. Thanks a lot, New York Times. Apparently it’s really, really hard to get doctors and nurses to wash their hands between patients, despite sign after posted sign that tells them they have to. Turns out, those signs are the problem! According to a study coming out in the journal Psychological Science, changing the wording from “Wash your hands to protect yourself” to “Wash your hands to protect your patients” might be enough to spur hospital workers to wash their hands more frequently.
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People Think The “Typical” Member Of A Group Looks Like Them
What does a typical European face look like according to Europeans? It all depends on which European you ask. Germans think the typical European looks more German; Portuguese people think the typical European looks more Portuguese. That’s the conclusion of a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The results shed light on how people think about groups they belong to. Other studies have found that, when people choose typical characteristics for a group they’re in, they’ll pick characteristics more like themselves. But that research was done using words.
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Will Work For . . . Well, That Depends.
It’s going to be a gloomy Labor Day for many this year. The national unemployment rate, now 9.1 percent, won’t seem to budge, and many states are doing worse than that. The unemployment rate in California exceeds 12 percent, with some communities registering staggering rates of more than 30 percent. Yet jobs go begging. I see jobs advertised in store windows of my hometown, Washington, DC, where one in ten workers is out of work. Many working Americans find this perplexing. Isn’t it simple economics that the unemployed would take these jobs—indeed welcome any job—when times are rough?
