Is there an upside to attention deficit disorder?
makes you more creative. Via Imagine: How Creativity Works: Surprisingly, those students diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) got significantly higher scores. White then measured levels of creative achievement in the real world, asking the students if they’d ever won prizes at juried art shows or been honored at science fairs. In every single domain, from drama to engineering, the students with ADHD had achieved more. Their attention deficit turned out to be a creative blessing. Join over…
1 min read
What does Facebook know about your relationships?
cebook crunches the numbers and comes up with some interesting info on when people get together and when they split up: The days around Valentine's Day and Christmas are good chances to try your luck or breathe a bit easier. The data showed far more people paired up around these times than joined the ranks of the newly single. And: Across age groups, the summer months are bad news for relationships. In 2010 and 2011, May through August were clearly…
1 min read
You Can Tell A Liberal From A Conservative By The Breed Of Dog They Own
a The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion: We found that people want dogs that fit their own moral matrices. Liberals want dogs that are gentle (i.e., that fit with the values of the Care foundation) and relate to their owners as equals (Fairness as equality). Conservatives, on the other hand, want dogs that are loyal (Loyalty) and obedient (Authority). Join 151,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: 5 things you didn't know…
1 min read
People Can Tell You Have This Mental Disorder By Looking at Your Facebook Profile
ur profile tells people whether you have anxiety: Research on Facebook has suggested that individuals’ profiles are an accurate portrayal of the self and that it may be possible to identify traits such as narcissism and extraversion by viewing a Facebook profile. It has been suggested, however, that largely internal experiences, such as anxiety, should be less detectable in such contexts. In the current study, the authors tested if objective criteria (e.g., number of interests) on users’ profiles (N 1⁄4…
1 min read
What is the single strongest predictor of IQ?
a The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement: The single strongest predictor of a person’s IQ is the IQ of his or her mother. Also interesting: However, once you get beyond the school environment, it’s not a very reliable predictor of performance. Controlling for other factors, people with high IQs do not have better relationships and better marriages. They are not better at raising their children. In a chapter of Handbook of Intelligence, Richard K. Wagner…
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Does getting drunk make you more politically conservative?
litical conservatism rose with blood alcohol content. These studies show that conservatism may be tied to low effort vs deliberate thinking: The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’…
1 min read
Can Facebook predict who you’re going to be dating next week?
a The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (Hat tip: Allfacebook): As the service’s engineers built more and more tools that could uncover such insights, Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now. To deduce this he studied who…
1 min read
How can you quickly and easily make someone act more kind?
mic their behavior. I've posted a number of times before on the power of mimicry to influence others (here, here, here.) This study is interesting because it demonstrates that mimicry doesn't work by only building a bond between the two involved, it makes the person who is mimicked feel better and act nicer to everyone. Recent studies have shown that mimicry occurs unintentionally and even among strangers. In the present studies, we investigated the consequences of this automatic phenomenon in…
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