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Detecting Bullshit
When Carl Bergstrom worked on plans to prepare the United States for a hypothetical pandemic, in the early 2000s, he and his colleagues were worried vaccines might not get to those who needed them most. “We thought the problem would be to keep people from putting up barricades and stopping the truck and taking all the vaccines off it, giving them to each other,” he recalls. When COVID-19 arrived, things played out quite differently. One-quarter of U.S. adults remain unvaccinated against a virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans.
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What the Second-Happiest People Get Right
In 2007, a group of researchers began testing a concept that seems, at first blush, as if it would never need testing: whether more happiness is always better than less. The researchers asked college students to rate their feelings on a scale from “unhappy” to “very happy” and compared the results with academic (GPA, missed classes) and social (number of close friends, time spent dating) outcomes. Though the “very happy” participants had the best social lives, they performed worse in school than those who were merely “happy.” ...
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Does Religion Make People More Ethical?
Do children need religion to grow into good people? Sixty-five percent of Americans think so. And even though younger adults have been leaving traditional faiths in droves, about 48% of them still hold this view. The result is a lot of conflicted parents. While they don’t necessarily miss going to church, synagogue or mosque, they do worry that without some sort of religious education, their kids might not grow into morally upstanding people. So while many leave formal religion behind in their 20s and 30s, they slowly, and often somewhat reluctantly, begin to return when they have kids.
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Algorithms, Lies, and Social Media
There was a time when the internet was seen as an unequivocal force for social good. It propelled progressive social movements from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring; it set information free and flew the flag of democracy worldwide. But today, democracy is in retreat and the internet’s role as driver is palpably clear. From fake news bots to misinformation to conspiracy theories, social media has commandeered mindsets, evoking the sense of a dark force that must be countered by authoritarian, top-down controls. This paradox — that the internet is both savior and executioner of democracy — can be understood through the lenses of classical economics and cognitive science.
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Mental Health Problems Come With ‘Cost’ of Poorer Cognitive Function
All types of mental disorders come with a hidden cost in the form of cognitive dysfunction, including deficits in memory, attention, executive functions and processing speed, according to a comprehensive study that my colleagues and I published in June in the journal Clinical Psychology Review. We found that both diagnosable mental disorders, as well as some common symptoms such as anxiety and worry, carry a “cognitive price.” We termed this phenomenon “The C Factor” — short for cognitive dysfunction. This can be defined either as lower performance on cognitive tests or reduction in cognitive abilities, such as attention and memory.
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What Does It Take To Be an Effective Mental Health App?
Accessing mental health care has long been difficult, and the pandemic has further increased the strain. And there are thousands of mental health apps — about 20,000 and counting — designed to tackle the problem. They range from mood trackers, guided mindfulness exercises and apps with chatbots that teach coping skills. Spending on them has grown quickly since 2019 and is predicted to reach about $500 million this year, according to a report from Deloitte. But not all these apps are backed by science.
