What is behind the chronic compassion deficits of some doctors, managers, police officers, school counselors, and other "bad news bears?" Why do they express so little appropriate emotion and invoke such costly wrath? Read more at Psychology Today.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
This Week in Psychology Today: Bad News, Bearishly Delivered
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
This week on Psychology Today: All Too Human?
Humans and chimps had a common ancestor 4-6 million years ago. Humans’ common ancestor with orangutans lived a far more distant 15 million years ago. This may be why chimps' personalities are like humans’ in many respects, and why orangs' personalities are like humans’ only in some.
Or not. How much like humans are chimps and orangs, anyway? Are they more similar to us than the puppies we dress in doll clothes so we can circulate cute pictures on the Internet? Are they more similar than cows that look pensive or chipmunks that “complain?”
Such are the questions that intrigued the University of Edinburgh's Alexander Weiss, lead author of a study in the journal Animal Behavior.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
This Month in Scientific American: Some Like it Too Hot
Why Extramarital Sex Can Kill
To be sure, death by copulation is rare. But the data suggest that when it happens, it usually happens to adulterers, and the cause is typically cardiovascular. Read more.
Monday, July 09, 2012
MURDERS MOST FOUL: And the School Shooters in our Midst
MURDERS MOST FOUL: And the School Shooters in Our Midst.
15,000 words.
Vook, Inc., 2012
Available as Kindle and Nook eBooks, and in the iBookstore.
$1.99 at Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com.
More info at MurdersMostFoul.com.
Sunday, June 17, 2012
This Week at PsychologyToday.com: Machiavellian IQ
In the game of Public Good, winning requires duplicity and the willingness to do harm.
Friday, May 18, 2012
In Discover Magazine: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Allergies
Curing them by giving yourself hookworms, preventing them
by putting RFID tags in your food, and avoiding them in Knoxville, the Allergy
Capital of the country.
- Our immune system may be like those small bands
of Japanese “holdout” soldiers after World War II. Not knowing that
the war was over, they hid for years, launching guerrilla attacks on peaceful villages.
- With our living environment well scrubbed of germs, our body’s immune “soldiers” mistakenly fire on innocent peanuts and cat dander.
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
This Week in Psychology Today: The Show Must Go On
And the Experiment Must Continue
In the early 1960s, after the trial began in Jerusalem of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, Yale social scientist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in pathological obedience. The setting was a fake (but convincing) language learning lab. On the basis of his scientific authority, the experimenter convinced test subjects to administer what they thought were brutal, even life-threatening corrective shocks to "learners" trying to memorize word pairs. Eighty percent of the test subjects obeyed, and they did so despite having voiced strong moral qualms about what was being asked of them.
Milgram wanted to learn whether it was possible that the millions of guards, police, and informers complicit in the Holocaust had merely been following orders, as many had claimed. He concluded from the ease with which he convinced people to be ruthless that it was, indeed, possible. "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process."
Fast forward about 50 years. A team from both Aix-Marseille University and Paris West University (Nanterre) recreated Milgram's famous experiment—only this time the experimenter had no scientific authority. The experiment's setting was a reality TV show shot before a live studio audience, and the experimenter was a fashionably attired game show host. Did the unwitting "contestants" follow orders? Was the host's authority significant enough to turn contestants into monsters? And what might the new experiment's results mean for reality TV, with the shows continually besting each other to be the most barbarous?
Find out at Psychology Today.
In the early 1960s, after the trial began in Jerusalem of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, Yale social scientist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in pathological obedience. The setting was a fake (but convincing) language learning lab. On the basis of his scientific authority, the experimenter convinced test subjects to administer what they thought were brutal, even life-threatening corrective shocks to "learners" trying to memorize word pairs. Eighty percent of the test subjects obeyed, and they did so despite having voiced strong moral qualms about what was being asked of them.
Milgram wanted to learn whether it was possible that the millions of guards, police, and informers complicit in the Holocaust had merely been following orders, as many had claimed. He concluded from the ease with which he convinced people to be ruthless that it was, indeed, possible. "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process."
Fast forward about 50 years. A team from both Aix-Marseille University and Paris West University (Nanterre) recreated Milgram's famous experiment—only this time the experimenter had no scientific authority. The experiment's setting was a reality TV show shot before a live studio audience, and the experimenter was a fashionably attired game show host. Did the unwitting "contestants" follow orders? Was the host's authority significant enough to turn contestants into monsters? And what might the new experiment's results mean for reality TV, with the shows continually besting each other to be the most barbarous?
Find out at Psychology Today.
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