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We Don’t Gradually Glide Into Corrupt Behavior—We Jump Head First
Pacific Standard: So it’s a good time to take a step back and ask: What leads people to make dishonest, self-serving decisions? ... A research team led by psychologist Nils Kobis provide evidence of this dynamic in the journal Psychological Science. The first of their four experiments featured a five-round auction game “in which one of the two players gets the option to circumvent the fair-bidding process by bribing the allocator.” Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
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A healthy Super Bowl strategy to make you happier come Monday
The Buffalo News: Don’t beat yourself up too much the day after Super Bowl LI if you went overboard – especially if your favorite team lost (think early 1990s in these parts). People in cities with the losing team tend to eat 16 percent more saturated fat the day after the big game than on a typical Monday, according to a 2013 report in the journal Psychological Science, while fans of the winning squad eat 9 percent less. Read the whole story: The Buffalo News
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Political Affiliation Can Predict How People Will React to False Information About Threats
Social conservatives are more likely to believe untrue warnings about possible threats than are liberals, two studies show.
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6-Year-Old Girls Already Have Gendered Beliefs About Intelligence
The Atlantic: “There are lots of people at the place where I work, but there is one person who is really special. This person is really, really smart,” said Lin Bian. “This person figures out how to do things quickly and comes up with answers much faster and better than anyone else. This person is really, really smart.” Bian, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, read this story out to 240 children, aged 5 to 7. She then showed them pictures of four adults—two men and two women—and asked them to guess which was the protagonist of the story.
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The Normalization Trap
The New York Times: What’s normal? Perhaps the answer seems obvious: What’s normal is what’s typical — what is average. But in a recent paper in the journal Cognition, we argue that the situation is more complicated than that. After conducting a series of experiments that examined how people decide whether something is normal or not, we found that when people think about what is normal, they combine their sense of what is typical with their sense of what is ideal. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Cats may be as intelligent as dogs, say scientists
BBC: Japanese scientists say cats are as good as dogs at certain memory tests, suggesting they may be just as smart. A study - involving 49 domestic cats - shows felines can recall memories of pleasant experiences, such as eating a favourite snack. Dogs show this type of recollection - a unique memory of a specific event known as episodic memory. Humans often consciously try to reconstruct past events that have taken place in their lives, such as what they ate for breakfast, their first day in a new job or a family wedding. ...
