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Delusional and mad they may be, but I love my big pile of self-help books
The Belfast Telegraph: Do you need help? Well, help yourself. Fill, as it were, your boots. Your own boots, mind. Yup, we live in do-it-yourself society or, perhaps more accurately, a read about doing-it-yourself society. We can't help buying self-help books. Self-certified gurus have taken the place of priests and ministers, who fell from grace with the discovery by Darwin that they were talking cack. Even then, it was a rare Sunday in church when you'd be offered five ways to improve your self-esteem, make friends through aromatherapy, or what to expect in the afterlife.
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Vitamins bad for health, experts claim
Mirror: VITAMIN pills can be bad for you – because you’re more likely to indulge bad habits. People on supplements tend to engage in more potentially harmful activities such as casual sex or excessive eating and drinking, a study found. They think taking the pills gives them a “licence to indulge”. Experts say this explains why supplements’ popularity is not reflected in public health improvements. Drug firms say almost half all Brits take vitamins, spending £400million on them last year. The researchers gave placebos to 82 volunteers and told half that their pills were fakes. The rest, who thought they were taking vitamins, felt more “invincible” than the first group.
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Why are we so bad at predicting what will make us happy? (Pt.2)
Business Insider: I previously posted about why we're awful at predicting what will make us happy: we're lousy at remembering our predictions so we don't learn how to correct our errors. There are some others reasons: When you're emotional, you're a different person. That's not an excuse but there is science to back it up. Calm people were terrible at predicting how moral they would be once emotional: Can people accurately predict how they will act in a moral dilemma? Our research suggests that in some situations, they cannot, and that emotions play a pivotal role in this dissociation between behavior and forecasting.
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Decision Making Changes With Age – and Age Helps!
We make decisions all our lives—so you’d think we’d get better and better at it. Yet research has shown that younger adults are better decision makers than older ones. Some Texas psychologists, puzzled by these findings, suspected the experiments were biased toward younger brains. So, rather than testing the ability to make decisions one at a time without regard to past or future, as earlier research did, these psychologists designed a model requiring participants to evaluate each result in order to strategize the next choice, more like decision making in the real world. The results: The older decision makers trounced their juniors.
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Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
The New York Times: Three men doing time in Israeli prisons recently appeared before a parole board consisting of a judge, a criminologist and a social worker. The three prisoners had completed at least two-thirds of their sentences, but the parole board granted freedom to only one of them. Guess which one: Case 1 (heard at 8:50 a.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud. Case 2 (heard at 3:10 p.m.): A Jewish Israeli serving a 16-month sentence for assault. Case 3 (heard at 4:25 p.m.): An Arab Israeli serving a 30-month sentence for fraud. There was a pattern to the parole board’s decisions, but it wasn’t related to the men’s ethnic backgrounds, crimes or sentences.
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“Culture of honor” in some states takes deadly toll on men
CBS News: "A real man doesn't let anyone push him around." If you agree with that that statement, you're buying in to the "culture of honor" that predominates in some parts of the country. You could also be putting your life on the line, a new study suggests. Men who think they should defend their reputation at all costs often resort to violent confrontations or take needless risks, which can lead to injury or death. Think of the man who feels he must not tolerate being cut off on the highway, or who won't back down when someone breaks in line. "Our study shows that homicide rates are a lot higher in honor states," Dr.
