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Eat, Drink and Be Scary!
The modern interest in Halloween has really nothing to do with the paranormal, according to psychological scientists.
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“The Steroids of Scientific Competition”
A week or so ago, I wrote up some new research showing how easy it is for psychological scientists to falsify experimental results. The point of the report, published on-line in the journal Psychological Science, was not that researchers are deliberately, or mischievously, reporting bogus findings. The point was instead that commonly accepted practices for reporting and analyzing data can lead inadvertently to invalid conclusions. According to the authors of the paper, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Berkeley, the commonly accepted “false positive” rate of 5 percent could in reality run as high as 60 percent if all these practices come into play.
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Peace in our time?
The Daily Mail: Hear the good news! ‘We are living in the most peaceable era of our species’ existence!’ Well, you could have fooled me. Who says so? And why? The herald of reassurance is professor Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist with impressive books to his credit on how our minds work. He draws his conclusion - that human violence has declined amazingly, is still declining and may be on the way out - from a 700-page survey of the subject, packed with statistics, table after table and graph after graph. The professor writes as though he knows that I am not going to believe him.
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Con la suerte de tu lado
Yahoo News Argentina: Recuerdo que cuando iba en preparatoria tuve las clases más difíciles de mi vida: cálculo diferencial, geometría analítica y química orgánica. En ese entonces tendría diecisiete años y tres objetos "de la suerte" que me acompañaban en los días de exámenes, mi lápiz de la suerte, una estampita de la virgen de Guadalupe y unos aretes horribles pero muy poderosos, según yo. Sin ellos, no podía entrar al examen, simplemente me paralizaba de nervios. Mis objetos de la suerte han ido cambiando con el paso del tiempo.
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Explained: Why Men Have a Harder Time Making Friends
The Huffington post: In my college course on the science of well-being, I devote at least three classes to what psychologists have learned about nourishing healthy relationships. Ask school children who their friends are and many list last names close to them in the alphabet. Why? Because most friendships are determined by seating charts. Schools shove future friends in your face. During the innocence of youth, proximity alone is grounds for liking someone. But things change dramatically as we get older, especially for men. Open-mindedness takes a hit. What other people think of us and where we stand in the social hierarchy is of epic importance.
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Men quickest to say ‘I love you’
The Telegraph: Previous research indicated that women are more expressive about how they feel - and tend to be ones who fall in love first. The reality, according to the latest findings by psychologist Marissa Harrison, from Pennsylvania State University in the US, is that women are actually more circumspect than men when it comes to romance. The study, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, showed men were more likely to fall in love within a few weeks, while most women said it took several months. Men were also more inclined to tell their partner they loved them much sooner in the relationship. Read the whole story: The Telegraph
