If you want to crack someone’s skull, should you use a full beer bottle or an empty one?
oks like you should enjoy your beer before you assault people: Beer bottles are often used in physical disputes. If the bottles break, they may give rise to sharp trauma. However, if the bottles remain intact, they may cause blunt injuries. In order to investigate whether full or empty standard half-litre beer bottles are sturdier and if the necessary breaking energy surpasses the minimum fracture-threshold of the human skull, we tested the fracture properties of such beer bottles in a…
1 min read
Can buying generic products reduce your self-esteem?
ople purchase generic products in an attempt to reduce costs. In this article, we showed that using generic products primes a devalued sense of self-worth manifested by increasing the likelihood of lower self-evaluations. In Experiment 1, participants were randomly assigned to use generic or genuine computer peripherals to make personal vitas for an upcoming recruitment orientation. Those using generic peripherals expected to earn a lower salary per month than the participants using original peripherals. Experiment 2 showed that the effect…
1 min read
How important is legacy status in college admissions?
cording to the study, by Michael Hurwitz, a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants to a parent’s alma mater had, on average, seven times the odds of admission of nonlegacy applicants. Those whose parents did graduate work there or who had a grandparent, sibling, uncle or aunt who attended the college were, by comparison, only twice as likely to be admitted. And: Mr. Espenshade pointed out that legacy status is just one of many possible advantages.…
3 minutes
Can you tell if a woman is a lesbian just by looking at her face?
ereas previous work has shown that male sexual orientation can be accurately and rapidly perceived from the human face and its individual features, no study has examined the judgment of female sexual orientation. To fill this gap, the current work examined the accuracy, speed, and automaticity of judgments of female sexual orientation from the face and from facial features. Study 1 showed that female sexual orientation could be accurately judged from the face and from just eyes without brows and…
1 min read
How to quickly and easily feel more powerful and increase self-esteem:
line with recent theories of embodied cognition, the authors propose that the self-concept may be embodied in sensory-motor representations. To test this notion, two studies investigated the effects of bodily feedback from a gesture associated with power (making a fist) on the self-concept. As expected, making a fist led male participants to perceive themselves as more assertive and esteemed (Study 1) and to display stronger associations between the self-concept and power (Study 2), while these effects were absent among…
1 min read
Can you predict violence in an area by looking at alcohol sales?
CKGROUND: Alcohol is a contributing cause of unintentional injuries, such as motor vehicle crashes. Prior research on the association between alcohol use and violent injury was limited to survey-based data, and the inclusion of cases from a single trauma centre, without adequate controls. Beyond these limitations was the inability of prior researchers to comprehensively capture most alcohol sales. In Ontario, most alcohol is sold through retail outlets run by the provincial government, and hospitals are financed under a provincial health…
2 minutes
Do blondes raise more funds?
is study uses a door-to-door fund-raising field experiment to explore the returns to physical appearance on fund-raising success. Interestingly, blonde females earn more on average than brunette counterparts. However, the returns to physical appearance depend critically on the race of a potential donor. Source: "Fund-raising success and a solicitor's beauty capital: Do blondes raise more funds?" from Economics Letters. Join over 185,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done…
1 min read
Who makes a better eyewitness: men or women?
e research focused on sex differences in the accuracy and quantity of memory recall for specific details of an event. The respondent sample included 280 participants (57.5% females and 42.5% males) with an average age of 19 years. The participants were shown a two-minute recording of a violent robbery, supposedly captured by a surveillance camera, and told their help was needed in verifying hypotheses for the criminal investigation. The results have shown that, overall, females are more reliable eyewitnesses than males.…
1 min read
