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The Science of Finding the Perfect Christmas Gift
LiveScience: For all of recorded history, people have been giving presents for a myriad of reasons: to show affection, curry favor, or fulfill familial duty. And the custom goes beyond the human species. Even family cats are known to bequeath presents of dead mice or birds on their owners. There's also regifting — recycling a gift you've received previously — which new research in the journal Psychological Science suggests may not be as offensive as once thought, at least to the gift giver.
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Getting the Cold Shoulder
The New York Times: In “Jealous Guy,” John Lennon described his heart-aching insecurity as “shivering inside.” In “The Rain Song,” Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant bemoaned, “I’ve felt the coldness of my winter.” And in “It Will Be Lonely This Christmas,” the ’70s band Mud crooned desperately, “It’ll be cold, so cold, without you to hold.” The poets were right about the chill of isolation and rejection — more, perhaps, than even they knew: when a person feels lonely or is being excluded by others, his or her skin literally becomes colder. For the past several years, our lab has been studying just how people respond to exclusion and other social interactions.
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The Mind’s Compartments Create Conflicting Beliefs
Scientific American: If you have pondered how intelligent and educated people can, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, believe that evolution is a myth, that global warming is a hoax, that vaccines cause autism and asthma, that 9/11 was orchestrated by the Bush administration, conjecture no more. The explanation is in what I call logic-tight compartments—modules in the brain analogous to watertight compartments in a ship. The concept of compartmentalized brain functions acting either in concert or in conflict has been a core idea of evolutionary psychology since the early 1990s.
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Too Big, Too Small? Optimal Circle Of Friends Depends On Socioeconomic Conditions, Goldilocks
Science 2.0: Do you prefer to have a few close friends or a larger social circle that is less deep? Social psychologists say your preference reflect your personality but also individual circumstances - like socioeconomic conditions. Social psychologists Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia and Selin Kesebir of the London Business School say that Americans may prefer a large social network, for example, because Americans move around a lot. Thus, it may make sense to spread time and resources across many friends to minimize the loss of any one friend moving away. Economic conditions at a given time are also a factor.
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‘It’s Just a Dog. Get Over It.’
The Wall Street Journal: Last week, the singer Fiona Apple told her fans that she would be canceling the South American leg of her concert tour in order to be with her dying dog. Ms. Apple's announcement, made in a four-page handwritten letter to fans, has elicited some pushback and—let's face it—some downright snarky commentary, as in: It's just a dog, Fiona. Get. Over. It. What's surprising, though, is that close to 80,000 people have "liked" Ms. Apple's Facebook FB +0.33% posting of her letter, and the vast majority of fans have supported her decision. Such expressions of support are unusual.
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What’s Your Meme? Changing the Climate Change Conversation
The New York Times: Yes we can! Ermahgerd. Occupy. I had a dream. Haters gonna hate. Tear down this wall! Gangnam Style. Drill, baby, drill. We are constantly bombarded by memes in our daily lives. Some spontaneously flare up and then burn out as quickly as they appeared, while others stick around for decades. We hardly consider their presence, much less contemplate their possible influence on our lives. Researchers in the emerging field of meme science are digging deeper, however, investigating how and why these sticky phrases or trends sink into our cultural psyche and subconsciously influence the way we process the world around us.
