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Intent to Harm: Willful Acts Seem More Damaging
How harmful we perceive an act to be depends on whether we see the act as intentional, reveals new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The new research shows that people significantly overestimate the monetary cost of intentional harm, even when they are given a financial incentive to be accurate. “The law already recognizes intentional harm as more wrong than unintentional harm,” explain researchers Daniel Ames and Susan Fiske of Princeton University.
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Why Summer Makes Us Lazy
The New Yorker: In his meticulous diaries, written from 1846 to 1882, the Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley complains often about the withering summer heat: “The heat wilts & enervates me & makes me sick,” he wrote in 1852. Sibley lived before the age of air-conditioning, but recent research suggests that his observation is still accurate: summer really does tend to be a time of reduced productivity. Our brains do, figuratively, wilt. One of the key issues is motivation: when the weather is unpleasant, no one wants to go outside, but when the sun is shining, the air is warm, and the sky is blue, leisure calls.
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Superstar Sports Players More Likely to Cheat
TIME: The first player to be affected by Major League Baseball’s crack-down on those caught using banned performance-enhancing drugs was Milwaukee Brewers’ outfielder Ryan Braun, who was suspended for the rest of the season. One would think that it would be the struggling or fringe players who’d be more likely to cheat, but Braun was a 2011 National League MVP. He has been a star his entire career, beginning in 2007 when he was named the National League Rookie of the Year. So why, of all people, would Braun feel the need to cheat? ... Research conducted by Zoe Chance, a professor of marketing at Yale School of Management, provides additional insight.
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How Babies Learn to Fear Heights
LiveScience: As any parent knows, babies aren't born with a fear of heights. In fact, infants can be frighteningly bold around the edge of a bed or a changing table. But around 9 months, babies become more wary of such drop-offs. New research suggests infants build an avoidance of heights once they get more experience crawling and navigating the world on their own. In one of their experiments, a group of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Doshisha University in Kyoto studied babies that not yet begun to crawl. Over the course of 15 days, some of the infants were trained to use a motorized baby go-cart that they could control. ...
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How You Unwrap Candy Can Make It Taste Better: The Power Of Food Rituals
Forbes: When I eat M&M’s, I never just crunch through them indiscriminately. First off, I only eat one at a time, each piece must be enjoyed just right. I begin by sucking on the crisp candy shell until the sugary coating has all but dissolved, then I delicately crack through into the center. Finally, I allow the hidden prize, the softened chocolate pastille, to be savored as it melts slowly on my tongue. ...
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I’m Excited About The Royal Baby (And It’s Okay If You Are Too)
Scientific American: It’s official. Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, gave birth to the “royal baby” on July 22nd, a bouncing baby boy who will one day be the King of the United Kingdom. Although many Americans are thrilled to partake in the Royal Baby fanfare, I’ve also seen a lot of discussions revolving around the questionable morality of celebrating an institution that openly reveres inherited privilege and power. It’s a very good point, and not one that I want to dismiss lightly. Sure, I enjoyed watching the Royal Wedding and shamelessly pored through pictures of Kate to keep tabs on her pregnancy style, but I really don’t like to think that I was celebrating institutionalized classism.
