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Our Need to Make And Enforce Rules Starts Very Young
The Wall Street Journal: Hundreds of social conventions govern our lives: Forks go on the left, red means stop and don’t, for heaven’s sake, blow bubbles in your milk. Such rules may sometimes seem trivial or arbitrary. But our ability to construct them and our expectation that everyone should follow them are core mechanisms of human culture, law and morality. Rules help turn a gang of individuals into a functioning community. ... In a clever 2008 study, the psychologists Hannes Rakoczy, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello showed systematically how sensitive very young children are to rules.
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What Do Benjamin Franklin, Elizabeth Warren and Tim Duncan Have in Common?
The New York Times: The study was almost laughably arcane: Air Force cadets’ pupils tended to dilate more when they read cartoons they thought were funny than for ones they didn’t think were funny. But the real punch line of this 1978 experiment — “Pupillary size as an indicator of preference in humor,” published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills — is what became of one of the authors, listed as Sullenberger, C. B. Chesley B.
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Wanted: Mars Explorers. Must Be Able To Tolerate Boredom And Play Nice With Others.
FiveThirtyEight: In December, NASA put out a call for adventurers interested in interplanetary exploration. “NASA is on an ambitious journey to Mars and we’re looking for talented men and women from diverse backgrounds and every walk of life to help get us there,” Charles Bolden, NASA administrator and a former astronaut, said in the announcement. More than 18,000 people answered the call, and between now and mid-2017, that vast pool of applications will be cut to 120 finalists, who will vie to become part of NASA’s next class of eight to 12 astronauts. ... Researchers involved in HI-SEAS are working on ways to defuse conflicts, and the first step is spotting them before anyone blows up.
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Brain Exercises Don’t Live Up to the Hype, Researchers Say
The Wall Street Journal: Computerized brain-training exercises and games, touted for their ability to improve overall cognitive function, may actually only help you get better at the specific game you’re playing. That’s the conclusion of a wide-ranging review of nearly 400 studies of brain training published last week in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The review found that none of the studies followed scientific best practices for comparing a group of people practicing an intervention against a control group not getting the intervention.
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How ‘Daycare’ Became ‘School’
The Atlantic: Chelsea Clinton made headlines recently as she campaigned for her mother—not for the policy proposals she defended, but for the fact that she did not accompany her not-quite-2-year-old daughter Charlotte to the first day of her Manhattan "school." While detractors were quick to berate her for missing this defining event in her child's life, supporters rushed to her defense by noting that the child’s father, who took Charlotte to school together with the family nanny, is perfectly capable of taking the lead. But what's missing from the discussion is an objection to the controversy’s premise—since when has "school" started at age 2? ...
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Police Lineups: The Science of Getting It Right
Discover: One night in 1984, a man broke into Jennifer Thompson’s apartment and raped her at knifepoint. Throughout the attack, the college student memorized every detail of her rapist’s face, promising herself that when she took the witness stand against him, “he was going to rot” in prison. Thompson hurried to police the morning after the attack, giving them a detailed description of her rapist, filling in all the characteristics she’d memorized so carefully. The police put together a photographic lineup – the standard lineup technique in the modern U.S. – and Thompson selected a man named Ronald Junior Cotton. “I had picked the right guy,” she said. “I was sure. I knew it.” ...
