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Study: Do men flash cash to find a mate?
USA Today: When women seem scarce, men may compete for them by being impulsive, saving less and borrowing more, according to a new study. "What we see in other animals is that when females are scarce, males become more competitive. They compete more for access to mates," lead author Vladas Griskevicius, an assistant professor of marketing at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, said in a university news release. "How do humans compete for access to mates? What you find across cultures is that men often do it through money, through status and through products," Griskevicius said.
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De baas voelt zich groter
De Standaard: Als mensen zich machtig voelen, dan voelen ze zich ook groot. Dat besluiten de Amerikaanse psychologen Michelle Duguid van de Washington University en Jack Goncalo van de Cornell University uit een reeks van drie experimenten die ze beschrijven in het vakblad Psychological Science. De onderzoekers hebben voor hun experimenten geen machtige en niet-machtige mensen gerekruteerd om die te vergelijken - echt machtige mensen zouden zich waarschijnlijk niet zo gauw laten overtuigen om als proefkonijn te dienen. In de plaats daarvan hebben ze gewone proefpersonen in groepen opgedeeld, en die zó gemanipuleerd dat ze zich tijdelijk machtig of net niet-machtig voelden.
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Study of the Day: Want to Improve a Woman’s Driving Skills? Flatter Her
The Atlantic: PROBLEM: Previous studies -- and far too many sexist jokes -- have discussed how women are not as skilled as men when it comes to tasks like parking and map-reading that require spatial awareness. University of Warwick psychologist Zachary Estes decided to find out if confidence could account for this gender difference. METHODOLOGY: Together with University of Georgia Health Center's Sydney Felker, Estes recruited 545 students for four experiments involving a 3-D mental rotation task that measures a person's spatial skills.
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Q & A With Psychological Scientist Daniel Levitin (Part 2)
Below is part 2 of Levitin's Q & A: How important is household upbringing to preference of music? For instance, if someone is raised in a home where gospel music is constantly played, do they develop a liking for this genre of music? (Even if the genre of music is not popular for the time period.) We don't really know much about upbringing and genre-specific preferences, but we do know something about broader issues of tonality and musical syntax. There appears to be a critical period for acquiring musical syntax as there is for acquiring speech syntax.
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National Pride Brings Happiness—But What You’re Proud of Matters
Research shows that feeling good about your country also makes you feel good about your own life—and many people take that as good news. But Matthew Wright, a political scientist at American University, and Tim Reeskens, a sociologist from Catholic University in Belgium, suspected that the positive findings about nationalism weren’t telling the whole story. “It’s fine to say pride in your country makes you happy,” says Wright. “But what kind of pride are we talking about?
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The Default Choice, So Hard to Resist
The New York Times: IN the wide-open Web, choice and competition are said to be merely “one click away,” to use Google’s favorite phrase. But in practice, the power of digital distribution channels, default product settings and traditional human behavior often matters most. In a Senate hearing last month about Google, Jeremy Stoppelman, the chief executive of Yelp, pointed to that reality in his testimony. “If competition really were just ‘one click away,’ as Google suggests,” he said, “why have they invested so heavily to be the default choice on Web browsers and mobile phones?” “Clearly,” he added, “they are not taking any chances.” Read the whole story: The New York Times