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Planning to Do Good Tomorrow Gives Us Permission to Be Bad Today
Pacific Standard: A recent study provided still more evidence of the very human tendency to engage in “moral licensing.” It found people who reported doing a good deed in the morning—and thereby solidified their self-image as admirably virtuous—were more likely to engage in unethical behavior later that day. While this largely unconscious dynamic is hardly something to be proud of, newly published research suggests it is amazingly easy to set into motion.
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The world is actually becoming more peaceful — believe it or not
PRI: It’s time for a reality check. War seems more widespread than ever. Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan, etc. Pope Francis warned earlier this month that a "piecemeal" World War III may have already begun. Violence on the streets seems to be growing too. But stop the presses! It seems that may not actually be true. “Violence exists,” says Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. “It hasn’t gone down to zero. But past decades were far more violent.” Pinker has crunched the numbers. He first published his findings in 2011 in a book called The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. He’s just updated his findings in the light of the violence in the three years since then.
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Troubled #hearts — in 140 characters
I joined Twitter in 2008, and I’ve always been impressed by the diversity of this floating conversation. People will just as soon tweet about dinner as the sorry state of American politics, and they are by turns thoughtful and shallow, original and fraudulent, snide and generous of spirit. In 140 characters or fewer, users reflect the range of human emotion, from joy to rage, wonder to boredom, cynicism to hopefulness. Individual Twitter users can obviously reveal a lot about their lives and feelings, even in terse tweets. But what about very large numbers of tweets, by many people in many places? Is it possible that aggregate Twitter patterns might also be revealing in some useful way?
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Brain Wave Could Prove What People Have Seen
Discovery: What if a brain wave test could prove whether you’d walked down the street carrying a yellow umbrella? New research suggests it could: Scientists have pinpointed a specific brain wave that responds to details it has encountered. That could have big implications for courtrooms (if a criminal had been carrying a pink umbrella, for example, a brain scan could help exonerate the suspect carrying the yellow umbrella). Electroencephalography (EEG) recordings show that the brain wave, known as P300, lights up when a person recognizes something meaningful among a list of random items. Read the whole story: Discovery
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Brain Activity Provides Evidence for Internal “Calorie Counter”
As you glance over a menu or peruse the shelves in a supermarket, you may be thinking about how each food will taste and whether it’s nutritious, or you may be trying to decide what
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Scientists Trying New Trick to Catch You in a Lie
ABC News: Ah, Pinocchio, where are you when we need you? How convenient it would be if a liar's nose grew longer with every lie. Then we wouldn't need modern science with all those brain scanners and high tech gizmos to tell us when somebody is fibbing. Ever since John Larson, a medical student at UC Berkeley, invented the polygraph in 1921, scientists have tried to come up with a more reliable way to decipher autonomous signals from the human brain whenever a subject is bending the truth. Cameras that track shifty movements of the human eye and sensors that detect sweaty palms or muscle twitches that we can't control have all been tried with varying degrees of success.
