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Social Science Palooza II
The New York Times: The nice thing about being human is that you never need to feel lonely. Human beings are engaged every second in all sorts of silent conversations — with the living and the dead, the near and the far. Researchers have been looking into these subtle paraconversations, and in this column I’m going to pile up a sampling of their recent findings. For example, Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim wrote a fantastic book excerpt in Sports Illustrated explaining home-field advantage. Home teams win more than visiting teams in just about every sport, and the advantage is astoundingly stable over time. So what explains the phenomenon? Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries?
It's not just how free the market is. Some economists are looking at another factor that determines how much a country's economy flourishes: how smart its people are. For a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies. In the last 50 years or so, economists have started taking an interest in the value of human capital. That means all of the qualities of the people who make up the workforce.
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Mind Reading: How Our Brains Predispose Us to Believe in God
TIME: Psychologist Jesse Bering is best known for his often risqué (and sometimes NSFW) Bering in Mind blog for Scientific American, which examines human behavior — frequently of the sexual sort. But he's also the director of the Institute for Cognition and Culture at Queen's University in Belfast and his new book, The Belief Instinct, examines an entirely different subject: why our brains may be adapted to believe in gods, souls and ghosts. How do you go from writing about sex to writing about religion? Morality is probably the common denominator. What does "theory of mind" — the ability to understand that other people have intentions and perspectives — have to do with believing in God?
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Do You Have the Luck Factor?
Why do some people lead happy successful lives while other face repeated failure and sadness? Why do some find their perfect partner whilst others stagger from one broken relationship to the next? What enables some people to have successful careers whilst others find themselves trapped in jobs they detest? Is luck only for the Irish or is there anything “unlucky people” can do anything to improve their luck and their lives? Ten years ago, Professor Richard Wiseman decided to search for the elusive luck factor by investigating the actual beliefs and experiences of lucky and unlucky people.
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Depressed Moms’ Parenting Style Linked to Toddler Stress
LiveScience: Preschoolers whose parents are depressed get stressed out more easily than kids with healthy parents, but only if their mothers have a negative parenting style, according to a new study. The research, set to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, measured the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in kids' saliva after mildly stressful experiences, such as interacting with a stranger. The researchers found that cortisol spikes were more extreme in kids whose parents had a history of depression and also exhibited a critical, easily frustrated parenting style.
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How a Helping Hand Can Slow You
It’s great to know your partner will help you pursue your goals, right? Maybe not. According to a new study published in Psychological Science, having a helpful partner can actually undermine your motivation to work towards those goals. This “self-regulatory outsourcing” phenomenon involves unconsciously relying on someone else to move your goals forward and, as a result, reducing your own efforts to reach those goals. In the authors’ first experiment, volunteers who focused on a way their partners helped them reach health and fitness goals planned to devote less effort to these goals than a control group.
