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Zazes, Flurps and the Moral World of Kids
The Wall Street Journal: Here's a question. There are two groups, Zazes and Flurps. A Zaz hits somebody. Who do you think it was, another Zaz or a Flurp? It's depressing, but you have to admit that it's more likely that the Zaz hit the Flurp. That's an understandable reaction for an experienced, world-weary reader of The Wall Street Journal. But here's something even more depressing—4-year-olds give the same answer. In my last column, I talked about some disturbing new research showing that preschoolers are already unconsciously biased against other racial groups. Where does this bias come from?
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The Riddle of Consciousness
The New Yorker: A few weeks ago, while staying with my in-laws, my four-month-old son woke up at two-thirty in the morning. He was hungry, and, knowing that he would not be coaxed back to sleep without a bottle, I brought him downstairs to the kitchen, where his crying stopped abruptly. He clearly recognized that he had arrived in an unfamiliar place, and he became fully absorbed in understanding where he was and how he’d gotten there. He was searingly alert; he craned his head and his eyes darted around. The eight minutes or so that it took it to warm the bottle, usually a time of intense complaint, passed with hardly a peep.
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More Satisfaction, Less Divorce for People Who Meet Spouses Online
TIME: More than one-third of American marriages today get their start online — and those marriages are more satisfying and are less likely to end in divorce, according to a new study. The research, which was funded by the online-dating site eHarmony, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Meeting online is no longer an anomaly, and the prospects are good,” says lead author John Cacioppo, a professor of social psychology at the University of Chicago. “That was surprising to me. I didn’t expect that.” Read the whole story: TIME
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People Are Overly Confident in Their Own Knowledge, Despite Errors
A collection of new studies confirms that overprecision is a common and robust form of overconfidence driven, in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments.
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The Power Of Rituals In Eating, Grieving And Business
Forbes: All over the world, people in pain turn to rituals in the face of loss—no matter if it’s the death of a loved one (dressing in black, for example), the end of a relationship (burning old love letters), or the crushing defeat in a Little League baseball game (graciously shaking hands with the winning team). But what’s the point? Behavioral scientist Michael I. Norton became interested in mourning rituals after reading Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering, which describes elaborate ways that parents, spouses, children, and friends dealt with the massive loss of soldiers during the American Civil War.
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Distracted Dining Increases Desire for Sugary, Salty Foods
Pacific Standard: Our eating habits have changed radically in recent decades, in at least two distinct ways. We increasingly multitask as we consume our meals, munching as we work at our desk or watch television. And, to the dismay of nutritionists, our food has higher concentrations of sugar and salt. New research from the Netherlands suggests the two phenomena may be directly related. A study just published in the journal Psychological Science finds people eating or drinking while mentally distracted require greater concentrations of sweetness, sourness, or saltiness to feel satisfied.
