Are lastborns creative risk-takers? Are firstborns smarter? What’s the deal with birth order?
stborns are more open to new ideas, more likely to come up with new scientific theories and more likely to be innovators: Via The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature: Generally speaking, lastborns tend to score higher on openness to new experiences and ideas, given the fact that they've had to think outside the box in uniquely positioning themselves within a smaller set of available niches. Sulloway tested his theory by investigating…
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Research Says These Complaints Signal The End Of A Relationship
ose that don't contain the word "but." Unqualified complaints were more common in relationships that weren't going well. Via 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute: Perhaps the most important difference came down to just one word—“but.” When talking about their partner’s greatest faults, those in successful relationships tended to qualify any criticism. Her husband was lazy, but that gave the two of them reason to laugh. His wife was a terrible cook, but as a result they…
1 min read
Do skinny women have more daughters? Do dominant women have more sons?
s on both. Via Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?: The Surprising Science of Pregnancy: Researchers in Italy collected data on nearly ten thousand new mothers and found that those in the lightest twenty-fifth percentile -- women who weighes 119 pounds or less before pregnancy regardless of height -- gave birth to significantly more daughters than did women who weighed more (51 percent versus 47 to 48 percent in the higher quartiles.) And: ...a team in Norway followed nearly forty…
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Are 80% of Harvard students first-born children?
is video is from "Justice", one of the most popular classes in Harvard's history. 23 minutes into the video, professor Michael Sandel asks students who are first-born to raise their hand -- and an eye-popping number do. Admittedly, this is a less-than-scientific survey but apparently Sandel's done this many many many times over the years and consistently come up with a similar result. Of course, there are possible confounds (upper class families who send their kids to Harvard have fewer…
1 min read
Will watching Shrek turn your kid into a creative genius?
ay, it won't turn your kid into Picasso but recent research says it has two things going for it. Green stimulates creativity: According to newly published research, innovative thinking seems to be stimulated by the color green. A research team led by University of Munich psychologist Stephanie Lichtenfeld reports the color of limes and leaves “has implications beyond aesthetics.” Specifically, a glimpse of green appears to activate “the type of pure, open (mental) processing required to do well on creativity…
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Why do grandmom’s cookies taste better than anyone else’s?
tentions change how we experience things. Kindness does soothe pain and increase pleasure. Via Eurekalert: A nurse's tender loving care really does ease the pain of a medical procedure, and grandma's cookies really do taste better, if we perceive them to be made with love - suggests newly published research by a University of Maryland psychologist. The findings have many real-world applications, including in medicine, relationships, parenting and business. "The way we read another persons intentions changes our physical experience…
1 min read
Are there easy ways to improve your next vacation?
ristian Jarrett has a long interesting piece on vacations in The Psychologist. There are a number of interesting highlights, including the optimal length of a trip: ...people on mid-length holidays of between three to six days tended to report more positive mood than those on shorter or longer trips. ‘Possibly a two- to six-day holiday trip is long enough to enjoy (unlike a two-day trip),’ Nawijn surmised, ‘but short enough to minimise arguments with partner, family or friends.’ There's often…
3 minutes
Does guilting people really work?
minding people of their transgressions causes them to improve their behavior: People’s desires to see themselves as moral actors can contribute to their striving for and achievement of a sense of self-completeness. The authors use self-completion theory to predict (and show) that recalling one’s own (im)moral behavior leads to compensatory rather than consistent moral action as a way of completing the moral self. In three studies, people who recalled their immoral behavior reported greater participation in moral activities (Study 1),…
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