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50th Anniversary of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiments
Stories of torture, corporate greed, fraud, and misconduct are regular features of daily news coverage. For years, psychological scientists have tried to understand why ordinary and decent people are driven to commit such atrocious acts. Much of what we know on this topic can be traced to the work of one man: Stanley Milgram. Fifty years ago, Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, began a famous and controversial series of experiments to test the boundaries of people’s obedience to authority and determine how far normal people would go in inflicting pain on others just because they were told to.
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How a Happy Marriage May Be Good for Your Heart
TIME Healthland: As we learned earlier today, marriage may make you fat, but a happy union may also help you live longer, according to a new study of heart patients. Patients who were married when they underwent coronary artery bypass surgery were more than twice as likely to survive for 15 years, compared with unmarried patients, and those who were in happier marriages were more likely to live longer. Researchers at the University of Rochester followed 225 bypass patients of both genders who had surgery between 1987 and 1990. The day before surgery, researchers asked about the patients' marital status; one year later, the participants were asked to rate their relationship satisfaction.
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When is a Face Hot or Not?
Boston Magazine: Why does Johnny Depp look so good in eyeliner? Why is the girl next door rarely ever also a Victoria’s Secret model? If somebody wanted to make Will Ferrell into a model, exactly which bits of his face would need to be tweaked to make it happen? These are the sorts of questions that keep attractiveness researchers awake at night. But now, there’s a solution. Published online last week in Psychological Science by face researcher-turned-vision scientist Chris Said at NYU and Alexander Todorov, who happens to be Said’s former Ph.D. adviser, is an amazingly comprehensive new statistical model for facial attractiveness. Yes, hotness can be measured and predicted.
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Spoilers: une brève réflexion
Le Nouvelliste: Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat… college.» – Annie Hall Les spoilers c’est mal. C’est là une des idées reçues les plus tenaces qui soient. Pourquoi lire 1984 ou regarder The Usual Suspects en connaissant d’avance la choquante et fascinante surprise finale? Mais encore, pourquoi pas? En effet, une nouvelle etude de la University of California at San Diego révèle que les spoilers, au contraire, augmentent le plaisir! Lire plus: Le Nouvelliste
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Scientific U-Turn: Male Bisexuality Is Real
LiveScience: A famous study conducted in 2005 proclaimed that male bisexuality is an illusion. Despite study participants claiming to be attracted to members of both sexes, when the subjects were hooked up to genital sensors and shown same-sex male and same-sex female pornography, individuals were only seriously aroused by one type or the other. The results were taken as evidence that, in terms of arousal, men are either gay, straight or lying.
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Kate Winslet and Ryan Gosling have the stuff of heroes. How about the rest of us?
Los Angeles Times: It's the stuff movies are made of, but this time it was real life: Actress Kate Winslet reportedly rescued billionaire Richard Branson's elderly mother from a burning home on Branson's private island in the Caribbean. And actor Ryan Gosling allegedly put himself in the middle of a heated New York City street fight, breaking it up. Should we consider these two celebrities heroes? And are most other people capable of the same -- of putting themselves in harm's way to help someone else?
