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Income Inequality and Distrust Foster Academic Dishonesty
College professors and students are in an arms race over cheating. Students find new sources for pre-written term papers; professors find new ways to check the texts they get for plagiarized material. But why are all these young people cheating? A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests one reason: income inequality, which decreases the general trust people have toward each other. Lukas Neville, a doctoral student at Queen’s University in Ontario, was inspired to do the study by his own teaching experience. “I ran into the question of academic dishonesty firsthand,” he says.
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Brain Stores Objects by Color, Too
How do we know what a lemon is, or a baseball? “Theories that explain how our brains store knowledge say that similar knowledge is stored in similar places. So things that are related - in how they look, how they smell, and so on - should overlap in the brain,” says Eiling Yee of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, & Language. In other words, the same part of your brain might store the information that both lemons and canaries are yellow. This sort of overlap has been shown for certain properties of objects, like their shape and function, or even for how you manipulate them with your hands.
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Real Good For Free: The Paradox of Leisure Time
I’m pretty busy. Like most people I know, I try to balance a lot of different things—a full-time job, household chores, cooking and meals, regular exercise, time with family and friends. Throw in an occasional bike ride, a movie or museum, maybe even reading a book—oh, and sleep—and there aren’t many free minutes left in a typical week. Yet I volunteer my time, too. I do this because it’s a good cause, but also because it makes me feel good. And somewhat surprisingly, I’ve never had the sense that this is one more obligation chipping away at my already compressed day. Indeed, it sometimes seems the other way around, as if working for free eases the time pressure of modern life.
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Canadian group studies impact of social networks on mental health
Montreal Gazette: A couple of months ago, Marisa Murray stepped out to grab a bite to eat with a friend. The restaurant they chose was busy, and the table they sat at was shoehorned between two large families. They didn't mind, but as Murray settled in, she found herself paying more attention to the people at the tables beside her than the person at her own. What caught the clinical psychology student's eye was that the families were socializing, but not with each other: Everyone, from the children to the grandparents, was nose deep in an electronic device. "It was so strange. There was no conversation. Within the family, everyone had a cellphone.
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Learning to Drive With A.D.H.D.
The New York Times: The first time Jillian Serpa tried to learn to drive, the family car wound up straddling a creek next to her home in Ringwood, N.J. Ms. Serpa, then 16, had gotten flustered trying to sort out a rapid string of directions from her father while preparing to back out of their driveway. “There was a lack of communication,” she said. “I stepped on the gas instead of the brake.” On her second attempt to learn, Ms. Serpa recalled, she “totally freaked out” at a busy intersection. It was four years before she tried driving again.
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I Think, Therefore I Exercise: Philosophy and Health
Researchers investigate how dualists, who view the body as separate and independent from the mind, tend to see their bodies and, specifically, their fitness and health.
