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The Dark Triad and the Evolution of Jerks
A great deal of recent research on evolution focuses on altruism—the tendency of creatures to help others, often at great cost to themselves. This is especially true of human beings, who help one another for a variety of good evolutionary reasons. For instance, people help kin, which is a way of preserving the genes that they share. People help others who are likely to help them back. But the prevalence of altruism also raises an evolutionary paradox: If evolution has selected humans to be nice and kind, how do we explain the high prevalence of jerks?
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Hide Your Phone When You’re Trying to Work. Seriously.
As I type this, my iPhone is tucked away inside my desk drawer under lock and key. It’s been there all day, completely out of sight. I’m slightly anxious about the notifications I might be missing, but only slightly; it’s a manageable level that’s not distracting. Yes, it’s a little extreme to lock your phone in a drawer. But I’ve learned that it’s the only way I can truly focus and be as productive as I want to be. And unfortunately, the same is true for you, even if you don’t realize it — or want to believe it.
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White liberals dumb themselves down when they speak to black people, a new study contends
You have recently joined a book club. Before each meeting, one member of the literary collective sends an email to the club secretary offering a few thoughts on the assigned text. This month, it’s your turn to compose the brief review. A new study suggests that the words you use may depend on whether the club secretary’s name is Emily (“a stereotypically White name,” as the study says) or Lakisha (“a stereotypically Black name”). If you’re a white liberal writing to Emily, you might use words like “melancholy” or “euphoric” to describe the mood of the book, whereas you might trade these terms out for the simpler “sad” or “happy” if you’re corresponding with Lakisha.
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Could consciousness all come down to the way things vibrate?
Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and an infinity of objects? How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there? Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A gnat? A bacterium? These questions are all aspects of the ancient “mind-body problem,” which asks, essentially: What is the relationship between mind and matter? It’s resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years. The mind-body problem enjoyed a major rebranding over the last two decades.
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On the board, ‘twokenism’ is the new tokenism
California recently passed historic legislation mandating that the boards of public companies based in the state include at least one woman. With just over 20 percent of S&P 500 company board seats occupied by women, it’s no surprise that progressive legislators are putting pressure on companies to diversify their boards. This pressure is part of a larger wave of growing public scrutiny over board composition. A reasonable question, however, is whether this kind of public scrutiny is likely to move the needle meaningfully on boardroom diversity. To what extent is board composition shaped by outside pressure and inspection?
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Just thinking you have poor endurance genes changes your body
If you want to win a race or stick to a difficult diet, coaches of all kinds will tell you it’s all about “mind over matter.” But that advice rarely crosses over into the medical community, where an inborn ability—or risk—is thought to depend more on genes and environment than on mindset. Now, in a study examining what may be a novel form of the placebo response, psychologists have found that just telling a person they have a high or low genetic risk for certain physical traits can influence how their body functions when exercising or eating, regardless of what genetic variant they actually have. The results could be an eye-opener for medical providers and consumer DNA testing companies.
