Who do we tell the most lies to? How do we tell them?
tell the most lies to the people we feel closest to. An online diary study was performed to investigate deception across different media. One hundred and four individuals participated in the study, with 76 completing the diaries. Individuals were most likely to lie on the telephone. Planned lies, which participants also rated the most serious, were more likely told via SMS (short message service) text messaging. Most lies were told to people participants felt closest to. The feature-based model…
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Is being a criminal hereditary?
idence is brought together to indicate that much criminality can be traced to environmental factors, but findings from family studies, twin studies, and adoption studies indicate that hereditary factors are also implicated in criminality. It is not a single genotype that provides the thrust toward crime, but a variety of phenotypical characteristics that are heritable in more or lesser degree. Such findings shall lead us to rethink our legal responsibility regarding criminals, their proper classification and treatment, and their responsibility…
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Reading to your kids is great but here’s why you’re doing it all wrong:
en reading to your kids, call attention to the words. It helps build their reading skills. Parents are encouraged to read to their children, and they frequently engage in shared book reading on the belief that the experience will foster their children's literacy development. In this article, the authors draw on a body of published studies to argue that shared book reading often does not lead to the benefits expected of it. The studies show that during parent-child shared reading,…
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Does being married bring you closer to your parents?
pe: Although some emphasize the integrative character of marriage, others argue that marriage undermines relations with extended kin, including aging parents. Utilizing NSFH data (N= 6,108), we find that married women and men have less intense intergenerational ties than the never married and the divorced: The married are less likely to live with parents, stay in touch, and give or receive emotional, financial, and practical help. These differences hold even when we control for structural characteristics, including time demands, needs…
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Are we wasting children’s time by giving them more homework?
llowing an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of homework, we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and…
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Do we idealize parenthood to rationalize the extreme sacrifices it takes to raise a child?
though raising children has largely negative effects on parents’ emotional well-being, parenthood is often idealized as a uniquely emotionally rewarding role. We tested the hypothesis that belief in myths idealizing parenthood helps parents cope with the dissonance aroused by the high financial cost of raising children. In Study 1, parents endorsed the idealization of parenthood more when only the costs of parenting were made salient than when both the costs of parenting and the long-term benefits of having children were…
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Do companies pay women more if a male CEO has a daughter?
men's salaries are higher when the boss has a daughter Drawing on research in sociology and economics suggesting that fathers' gender-related attitudes and behaviors are shaped by the gender of their children, we hypothesize that having daughters prompts male CEOs to implement wage policies that are more equitable to female employees. To test this hypothesis, we use a 12-year panel of Danish workforce data and an empirical specification with CEO–employee fixed effects, creating a quasiexperimental setting whereby the gender of…
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Is bribing your kids to eat vegetables a good idea?
rents commonly use rewards to encourage children to eat healthfully, but this practice remains controversial because rewards are suspected of undermining children’s intrinsic motivation. A cluster-randomized trial examined children’s acceptance of a disliked vegetable over 12 daily taste exposures. These exposures were paired with a tangible reward, a social reward, or no reward, and the findings were compared with the results from a no-treatment control condition. Liking and intake of the vegetable were assessed in a free-choice consumption task at…
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