How To Easily Be More Likable And Make People More Receptive
sten to what they have to say and ask them to tell you more: Two studies investigated the effect of expressed interest on individuals’ openness to opposing viewpoints and perceptions of debate counterparts. Participants in Study 1 engaged in an online conversation with a purported debate counterpart who did or did not express interest in the participants’ viewpoint by asking an elaboration question—that is, a question geared at soliciting additional information. Compared to control participants, participants who received a question…
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
Do beautiful people have more daughters?
e analysis of the National Child Development Study (NCDS) in the United Kingdom, which has data on the respondents’ completed fertility at age 47 (virtually all men and women complete their lifetime reproduction by age 45), replicates the earlier findings from the Add Health data in the United States and show that physically more attractive parents are indeed more likely to have daughters than physically less attractive parents. And: Being physically attractive at age 7 increases the odds of having…
1 min read
In what ways do judges with daughters vote differently?
cial scientists have long maintained that women judges might behave different than their male colleagues (e.g., Boyd et al. (2010)). This is particularly true when it comes to highly charged social issues such as gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and the status of gender as a suspect classification under federal law. Less studied has been the role that a judge’s family might have on judicial decision making. For example, we may think that a male judge with daughters might have different…
2 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
Are stepparents more likely to kill their children?
ereas young children incurred about seven times higher rates of physical abuse in step-plus-genetic-parent home than in two-genetic-parent homes, the differential in fatal abuse was on the order of 100-fold. Source: "Violence Against Stepchildren" from Current Directions in Psychological Science (June 1996) This is a well documented phenomenon known as The Cinderella Effect. It's been called "one of the poster-children of evolutionary psychology." Join over 151,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: 6 Hostage Negotiation Techniques That…
1 min read
Do violent men have more sons?
e generalized Trivers–Willard hypothesis (gTWH) [Kanazawa, S., 2005a. Big and tall parents have more sons; further generalizations of the Trivers–Willard hypothesis. J. Theor. Biol. 235, 583–590] proposes that parents who possess any heritable trait which increases the male reproductive success at a greater rate than female reproductive success in a given environment have a higher-than-expected offspring sex ratio, and parents who possess any heritable trait which increases the female reproductive success at a greater rate than male reproductive success in…
1 min read
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…
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