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…
2 minutes
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
What does the color of your clothing tell others about you?
a The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism: Red conveys energy, passion. Wear red to wake up an audience. Black shows you’re serious and that you won’t take no for an answer. White exudes honesty and innocence, which is why defendants often choose it in the courtroom. Blue emits trust. The darker the shade, the deeper the level of trust it elicits. Gray is a good neutral, the quintessential color of business. Orange…
1 min read
What’s the secret to dealing with an insecure or belligerent boss?
ow gratitude. Via Science Daily: According to the study, "high-power participants whose competence was threatened denigrated their subordinates. Importantly, this pattern disappeared when the subordinate expressed gratitude. Among low-power participants, there were no main effects of competence and gratitude expression, nor was there an interaction between competence and gratitude expression." And: Fast, whose previous work has explored how power, feelings of competence and aggression are related, further explained: "When people have power they feel the need to meet demanding role…
1 min read
Which is more creative: a team of strangers or a team of old friends?
e perfect mix lies in between the two, and can be measured scientifically. Via Imagine: How Creativity Works: In essence, the amount of Q reflects the “social intimacy” of people working on the play, with higher levels of Q signaling a greater degree of closeness. For instance, if a musical was being developed by a team of artists who had worked together several times before— this is common practice on Broadway, since producers see “incumbent teams” as less risky— that…
2 minutes
Divorce Is Contagious
vorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get…
1 min read
Are people nicer where the pace of life is slower?
s. Via The Science of Sin: The Psychology of the Seven Deadlies (and Why They Are So Good For You): In 2008, with Stephen Reysen and Ellen Ganz, both also at California State University at the time, Levine asked: does the pace of life in cities have any effect on helping behavior? Here’s what these researchers did to answer this question. First, they measured the pace of life in twenty-four US cities. These cities were sampled from the stereotypically torpid…
2 minutes
5 Things You Didn’t Know About Friendship, Backed By Research
me insights about friendship from research, with links to the studies: The secret to making friendships last is staying in touch every two weeks. Yawning can tell you who your real friends are. Yes, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. There is a limit to how many real friends you can have -- in life and on Facebook. More time with friends produces the happiness equivalent of an extra $133,000 a year. For more on the science behind making…
1 min read
