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How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul
The New York Times: One of the well-known costs of inequality is that people withdraw from community life and are less likely to feel that they can trust others. This is partly a reflection of the way status anxiety makes us all more worried about how we are valued by others. Now that we can compare robust data for different countries, we can see not only what we knew intuitively — that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive — but that it also damages the individual psyche. Our tendency to equate outward wealth with inner worth invokes deep psychological responses, feelings of dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority. This affects the way we see and treat one another.
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Study: Gossip can be good for society
WTOP: Mean girls, look out! Gossip can be used for good. A study conducted recently at Stanford University looked at the dynamics of people working within a group, and how problems occur when the classic egotistical and selfish bully takes over, derailing and damaging progress and equanimity fostered by the rest. The test was to see if a dose of their own medicine would change their bullying behavior and how this might benefit social situations across society. Published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the study explores the nature of gossip and ostracism.
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Charitable Giving Could Harm A Company’s Image, Study Says
The Huffington Post: Giving to charity may actually hurt a company’s reputation, a new study from the Yale School of Management has suggested. Interested in how people view donors who make a profit while doing good, Yale professors George Newman and Daylian Cain presented a number of charitable scenarios to their research participants. Their findings, which have been published in Psychological Science, suggest that people are quick to dismiss those who benefit in any way while engaging in philanthropy. "This work suggests that people may react very negatively to charitable initiatives that are perceived to be in some way 'inauthentic,'" Newman explained in a press release.
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Gordon Gekko on Handling Other People’s Money
In a scene from the 2010 film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, financial trader Gordon Gekko — played by Michael Douglas — defines moral hazard as a situation in which “somebody takes your money and he is not responsible for it.” A team of European researchers cite this cinematic example in a recently published study on how people feel when they take economic risks on someone else’s behalf, rather than their own. Scientists from the Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive in France found that when we entrust our money to someone else, they tend to not handle it as carefully as they would their own.
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For Couples, Mutual Ambivalence Increases Cardiovascular Risk
Pacific Standard: Toxic relationships have long been linked to poorer health. But newly published research suggests that, to increase your chances of developing cardiovascular problems, you and your spouse don’t have to despise one another. Mutual ambivalence will do the trick. That’s the disturbing finding of a team of University of Utah researchers led by health psychologist Bert Uchino. Figuring that totally negative relationships are rare (at home, if not at the workplace), they decided to look at whether having mixed feelings about one’s partner presents a health risk.
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Cognitive Science Society 36th Annual Conference
The 36th annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society will be held July 23–26, 2014, in Quebec City, Canada. Entries to be reviewed may be submitted in categories such as papers, symposia, presentation-based talks, member abstracts, tutorials, and workshops. They may focus on any area of cognitive science. For more information, see the conference home page.
