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Flu Psychology: Who Risks What for Whom?
The Huffington Post: My local pharmacy is offering flu shots. A window sign grabbed my attention the other day, because it was a sweltering, muggy day, and it seemed way too early to think about winter flu bugs. But a little digging proved me wrong on this. Apparently the vaccine takes a couple of weeks to kick in, and seasonal flu bugs can arrive as early as October. So I did the arithmetic, and I'm lining up to get poked. I've gotten flu shots for years, though I'm not in any high-risk group. It just seems prudent to me. And the fact is, public health officials count on people who are at low or moderate risk to get inoculated anyway.
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Study of Judges Finds Evidence From Brain Scans Led to Lighter Sentences
The New York Times: Judges who learned that a convicted assailant was genetically predisposed to violence imposed lighter sentences in a hypothetical case than they otherwise would have, researchers reported on Thursday, in the most rigorous study to date of how behavioral biology can sway judicial decisions. The findings, published in the journal Science, are likely to accelerate the use of brain science in legal proceedings, experts said, and to intensify a long-running debate about its relevance. Courts have increasingly admitted such evidence — brain scans, mostly, as well as genetic analyses — though many experts say the science is still too primitive to inform legal decisions.
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Spacing out for a bit can boost your memory
msnbc: Next time you zone out when your girlfriend is talking to you, just tell her you wanted to remember what she was saying longer. Wakeful resting--or zoning out--after learning something new can boost your memory, according to a study published in Psychological Science. In the study, researchers told two short stories to 33 people. After one story, the participants sat in a room with their eyes closed. After the second story, they played a computer game. Seven days later, the people who zoned out were able to recall more of the story details. After learning something new, your brain automatically replays the information to form a new memory.
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Penny for your magical thoughts
Times Higher Education: We can't resist investing in karma and bargaining with fate, say researchers. Matthew Reisz reports Anyone awaiting the results of a job application, a court case, a medical test - or even a submission to the research excellence framework - knows what it's like for important decisions to be completely beyond their control. But to cope with this uncertainty, we tend to "invest in karma" by, for example, dropping a few coins in a collection box as if we believed that "the universe punishes sin and rewards virtue".
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How Americans view wealth and inequality
BBC Business: There have been lots of questions and discussions recently about inequality and economists often argue about what is the right level of inequality to have in society. But Mike Norton, professor at Harvard Business School, and I decided to take a different path and we decided to ask people what inequality they would want. Now, there are lots of ways to ask this question and we used the philosopher John Rawls. Rawls said that "a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you'd be willing to enter it in a random place". And it's really a beautiful definition.
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The Mind of a Flip-Flopper
The New York Times: Forget for a minute everything you know about politics. Barack Obama now openly supports gay marriage. Mitt Romney now opposes roughly the same kind of health care reform he fought for as governor of Massachusetts. What if they weren’t two politicians calculating how to win an election but instead just two guys who changed their minds? They didn’t “flip-flop”; they experienced, as social scientists say, an attitude change, the way any of us do when we become a vegetarian or befriend a neighbor we used to hate or even just choose to buy a new brand of toothpaste.
