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Why Do We Share Stories, News, and Information With Others?
People often share stories, news, and information with the people around them. We forward online articles to our friends, share stories with our co-workers at the water cooler, and pass along rumors to our neighbors. Such social transmission has been going on for thousands of years, and the advent of social technologies like texting, Facebook, and other social media sites has only made it faster and easier to share content with others. But why is certain content shared more than others and what drives people to share?
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Adult sexting tied to power, ‘unlimited partners’
USA Today: Embattled Rep. Anthony Weiner, D.-N.Y., may have been the only person in the past week to gain national media attention for sending suggestive pictures of himself via social media, but his behavior follows a common pattern. Though research exists into so-called "sexting" by teens, including a widely publicized study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in 2009, studies on the sexting and online flirtation habits of adults are much more sparse. Some information does exist, albeit with widely varying estimates on how widespread the behavior is. Findings from Pew in October suggest 6% of adults have sent sexually explicit messages over the Internet.
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Queen bee in the office: who gets stung?
Financial Times: Female bosses get a bad rap. There's even a word for them. No, not that word. I am talking about the term "queen bee". The queen bee is the female boss who strives to protect her power at all costs. She distances herself from other women at the office, and rather than promote her junior counterparts, she refuses to help them rise through the ranks. But according to a new study by Belle Derks of Leiden University in the Netherlands, such behaviour may not necessarily be her fault. Rather, it is the product of an inherently sexist work environment.
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Need to remember something? Think of the dentist or dead cats
MSNBC: If you want to remember new information, looking at photographs that stir up negative emotions may do the trick, suggests new research from Psychological Science. Yeah, we know that sounds counterintuitive -- but it appears to work. When study participants viewed color images of a dead cat, a pointed gun, or a person getting a dental exam -- pictures that evoke negative feelings -- it actually improved their recall of recently learned information. In this case, 40 college students were asked to bone up on 100 vocabulary words in Swahili along with their English translations.
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Money and Mimicry
“Money, money, money Must be funny Money, money, money Always sunny In the rich man’s world.” -ABBA, 1976 We rely on money in our day-to-day life and it is constantly in our minds. After all, money makes the world go round, doesn’t it? Now, a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, tries to better understand the psychological effect of money and how it affects our behavior, feelings and emotions.
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Fast and furious: Belief, catharsis and video violence
The Supreme Court’s decision today to overturn California’s ban on selling violent video games to children will no doubt rekindle debate about catharsis. Catharsis is the notion that we can dampen our negative emotions by acting them out or witnessing them in our arts and entertainment—and that this is a healthy thing to do. The scientific evidence is fairly heavily stacked against this idea. Indeed there is evidence that indulging our anger and aggression can increase—not decrease—those destructive emotions. Even so, a lot of people still believe in catharsis. They believe that pummeling punching bags and watching Fight Club and cursing at the universe is cleansing.
