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The predictably irrational NBA lockout
ESPN: Dan Ariely thinks Duke basketball fans are crazy. Or at least they act a little irrational sometimes. As a behavioral economics professor at the ACC school, he noticed something interesting -- that fans who won Duke basketball tickets through a lottery tended to overvalue those tickets. In fact, those randomly selected students valued those tickets 10 times more than what other students did. Cameron Crazies, indeed. Ariely interpreted this phenomenon as an example of the endowment effect, an imperfection of the human mind that causes people to believe the things they possess are worth more than they actually are.
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Change in Mother’s Mental State Can Influence Her Baby’s Development Before and After Birth
As a fetus grows, it’s constantly getting messages from its mother. It’s not just hearing her heartbeat and whatever music she might play to her belly; it also gets chemical signals through the placenta. A new study, which will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this includes signals about the mother’s mental state. If the mother is depressed, that affects how the baby develops after it’s born. In recent decades, researchers have found that the environment a fetus is growing up in—the mother’s womb—is very important. Some effects are obvious. Smoking and drinking, for example, can be devastating.
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Why Do We Have Religion Anyway?
The vast majority of the world’s 7 billion people practice some kind of religion, ranging from massive worldwide churches to obscure spiritual traditions and local sects. Nobody really knows how many religions there are on the planet, but whatever the number, there are at least that many theories about why we have religion at all. One idea is that, as humans evolved from small hunter-gatherer tribes into large agrarian cultures, our ancestors needed to encourage cooperation and tolerance among relative strangers. Religion then—along with the belief in a moralizing God—was a cultural adaptation to these challenges. But that’s just one idea. There are many others—or make up your own.
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Curiosity Makes for Better Students
U.S. News & World Report: Curiosity may be dangerous for cats but it's great if you're a student, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzed data from some 50,000 students who took part in about 200 studies and found that curiosity was as strong as conscientiousness in influencing academic performance. Together, curiosity and conscientiousness are as important as intelligence in getting good grades, the researchers concluded. The study appears in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science. Read the full story: U.S. News & World Report
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Stress is as contagious as a cold
Marie Claire UK: A new study reveals that it's not just the common cold that does the rounds in the office. You can also catch other people's stress. Professor Elaine Hatfield, a psychologist from the University of Hawaii, claims that if you sit by a whinger at work you are at risk of catching passive or second-hand stress and anxiety, which can quickly circulate the office. 'People seem to be capable of mimicking others facial, vocal and postural expressions with stunning rapidity,' she says. 'As a consequence, they are able to feel themselves into those other emotional lives to a surprising extent.' Read the full story: Marie Claire UK
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Being a beauty has its benefits
New Zealand Herald: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is only skin deep. The list of adages goes on and on, but a new book written by an economics professor at the University of Texas-Austin concludes that beauty brings many real benefits. Daniel S Hamermesh has studied the economics of beauty for about 20 years. In the book, Beauty Pays, he writes that attractive people enjoy many advantages while those who are less attractive often face discrimination. Hamermesh finds beautiful people are likely to be happier, earn more money, get a bank loan with a lower interest rate and marry a good-looking and highly educated spouse. Read the full story: New Zealand Herald
