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How competition fuels inequality and conflict
Inequality is one of the best predictors of conflict ever found. Except when it isn’t. Consider homicide in the United States. In 1990 and again in 2010, there was an impressive correlation between income inequality and the homicide rate. Among the states where inequality was high, so was homicide; and where inequality was low, homicide was too. But over those same 20 years, inequality grew while homicides fell — the opposite of what you would expect. Call it the inequality paradox: The effect of inequality on conflict depends profoundly on the way it’s measured. --- With the help of a colleague, I tested this idea in an experiment just published in the journal Psychological Science.
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Put a Ring on It? Millennial Couples Are in No Hurry
The millennial generation’s breezy approach to sexual intimacy helped give rise to apps like Tinder and made phrases like “hooking up” and “friends with benefits” part of the lexicon. But when it comes to serious lifelong relationships, new research suggests, millennials proceed with caution. --- “People are not postponing marriage because they care about marriage less, but because they care about marriage more,” said Benjamin Karney, a professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Let’s hear it for Memorial Day weekend at the beach. Oh, but the litter …
Every Memorial Day weekend, it seems, the sea of red cups, beer cans and cigarette butts scattered across North Avenue Beach is a warm-weather reminder that for some, the world is their trash can. And during this, the start of road trip season, the detritus scattered along some highways and byways can be jarring. The costs are evident: The Chicago Park District alone spends about $4.7 million cleaning up the 26 miles of lakefront as well as parks across the city, and wildlife and aquatic life pay their own price when they consume littered plastic. In an age when recycling has become the norm and cleanup campaigns are common — including the Sweden-to-U.S.
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Passing the Marshmallow Test May Be More About Smarts Than Self-Control, Study Says
The historic "marshmallow test" has tied young children's ability to delay gratification to their long-term success, but a new, larger study replicating the famous study puts those long-term results in doubt. Using a significantly larger and more diverse group of children than the original study, researchers from New York University and the University of California, Irvine, compared 4-year-olds' ability to delay gratification to their academic and behavioral progress in 1st grade and at age 15.
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Another’s wasted investment is as disturbing as one’s own
THAT human beings often continue to pour money into bad projects because they have already invested in them and cannot bring themselves to lose that investment is well known. Indeed the sunk-cost fallacy, as this phenomenon is called, is frequently cited as an example of people failing to behave in the “rational” way that classical economics suggests they should. Though the exact psychological underpinning of the sunk-cost fallacy is debated, it might reasonably be expected to apply only when the person displaying it also made the original investment. However a study published recently in Psychological Science by Christopher Olivola of Carnegie Melon University suggests this is not true.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Political Self: How Identity Aligns Preferences With Epistemic Needs Christopher M. Federico and Pierce D. Ekstrom Previous research has suggested that people motivated to quickly get answers and make decisions (i.e., those with high need for closure) tend to affiliate with the political right. However, people who prefer to keep their options open (i.e., those with low need for closure) tend to affiliate with the political left. But how does the extent to which one's political preferences are central to one's self-concept affect these findings? The authors analyzed data from a U.S.
