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…
1 min read
Is happiness a turn-off?
..happiness was the most attractive female emotion expression, and one of the least attractive in males. In contrast, pride showed the reverse pattern; it was the most attractive male expression, and one of the least attractive in women." This research examined the relative sexual attractiveness of individuals showing emotion expressions of happiness, pride, and shame, compared with a neutral control. Across two studies using different images and samples ranging broadly in age (total N = 1041), a large gender difference emerged in the sexual attractiveness…
1 min read
Research Shows Trying To Look Smart Makes You Seem Stupid
st texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1–3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. This relationship held regardless of the quality of the original essay, and irrespective of the participants' prior expectations of essay…
1 min read
Married Baseball Players Make More Money
s: Using a sample of professional baseball players from 1871 - 2007, this paper aims at analyzing a longstanding empirical observation that married men earn significantly more than their single counterparts holding all else equal (the “marriage premium”). Baseball is a unique case study because it has a long history of statistics collection and numerous direct measurements of productivity. Our results show that the marriage premium also holds for baseball players, where married players earn up to 16 percent more…
1 min read
Does putting your best self forward reveal your true self?
w does trying to make a positive impression on others impact the accuracy of impressions? In an experimental study, the impact of positive self-presentation on the accuracy of impressions was examined by randomly assigning targets to either “put their best face forward” or to a control condition with low self-presentation demands. First, self-presenters successfully elicited more positive impressions from others, being viewed as more normative and better liked than those less motivated to self-present. Importantly, self-presenters were also viewed with…
1 min read
Are there tricks to detecting deception?
a Science Daily: Geiselman and his colleagues have identified several indicators that a person is being deceptive. The more reliable red flags that indicate deceit, Geiselman said, include: When questioned, deceptive people generally want to say as little as possible. Geiselman initially thought they would tell an elaborate story, but the vast majority give only the bare-bones. Studies with college students, as well as prisoners, show this. Geiselman's investigative interviewing techniques are designed to get people to talk. Although deceptive people…
3 minutes
How do you turn enemies into friends?
ke them work to achieve a common goal. Via Wikipedia: Sherif is equally famous for the Robbers Cave Experiments. This series of experiments, begun in Connecticut and concluded in Oklahoma, took boys from intact middle-class families, who were carefully screened to be psychologically normal, delivered them to a summer camp setting (with researchers doubling as counselors) and created social groups that came into conflict with each other. These studies had three phases: (1) Group formation, in which the members of…
1 min read
Should you trust your gut to tell you who is a good person?
mans behave altruistically in one-shot interactions under total anonymity. In search of explanations for such behavior, it has been argued that at least some individuals have a general tendency to behave altruistically independent of profitability. In fact, a stable altruistic trait would be adaptive if it were recognizable. Then, altruists could choose each other in order to retain benefits through mutual cooperation. Previous research has shown that individuals can predict the degree of altruistic behavior of strangers by reading signs…
2 minutes
