The New Yorker – The gangs of Rio de Janeiro – Audio Slide Show:
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1 min read
How we affect others, and others affect us:
my essay on social networks and research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, I describe a few of the striking medical effects produced by social networks: By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a remarkable discovery: Obesity spread like a virus. Weight gain had a stunning infection rate. If one person became obese, the likelihood that his friend would follow suit increased by 171 percent. (This means that the…
3 minutes
Is there a link between psychosis and creativity?
e results show a clear link between neuregulin 1 and creativity: Volunteers with the specific variant of this gene were more likely to have higher scores on the creativity assessment and also greater lifetime creative achievements than volunteers with a different form of the gene. Kéri notes that this is the first study to show that a genetic variant associated with psychosis may have some beneficial functions. He observes that “molecular factors that are loosely associated with severe mental disorders…
1 min read
Psychology Study: Anticipating an interaction with an obese person provokes feelings of social power
mans are obsessed with status. Beneath every social interaction, there's an implicit power play. This is made stark by a North American study showing that the anticipation of a conversation with an obese person provokes in normal-weight people feelings of increased power and dominance, presumably because of the stigmatised status of obese people in the United States. Olivier Klein and colleagues invited 77 normal-weight student participants to the psychology lab on the premise that they were to be observed…
2 minutes
Comic Relief – Swedish Chef makes donuts:
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Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard: Clay Shirky on the future of journalism 9/23 (Podcast/transcript)
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Hair Dyeing Fad Reflects Recession:
ed hair is making a comeback. L'Oréal, the world's no.1 hair dye manufacturer, saw the sales of its hair color products surge some 30 percent in September compared to a year earlier. The sales of unusual dye including red, copper and metallic colors soared 47 percent. Experts make connections between the trend and the recession. A beauty specialist said people seek to escape reality in a recession, and dyed hair offers a kind of fantasy image. During the 1997-98…
1 min read
The more you know someone, the less you like them:
u might love humanity in the abstract, but given greater exposure to any one person, the odds are pretty good that you’d soon dislike them, often intensely. JPSP ‘07: Although people believe that learning more about others leads to greater liking, more information about others leads, on average, to less liking. Thus, ambiguity—lacking information about another—leads to liking, whereas familiarity—acquiring more information— can breed contempt. This “less is more” effect is due to the cascading nature of dissimilarity: Once evidence…
2 minutes
