How many lives would you have to save to make up for a single murder?
en researchers asked students how many lives a person would have to save to be forgiven for a murder the median response was 25: It seems to us that frequency and diagnostic accounts, although clearly relevant and with some explanatory power, are not able, on their own, to account for the negativity bias in moral judgment. After all, heroic acts are surely as infrequent and diagnostic as immoral acts, yet murder is rarely balanced, in the judgment of people, by…
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Does being a military sniper make you dehumanize people?
. Looks like quite the opposite might be true. Via the BBC: ...a study into snipers in Israel has shown that snipers are much less likely than other soldiers to dehumanise their enemy in this way. Part of the reason for this may be that snipers can see their targets with great clarity and sometimes must observe them for hours or even days. "It's killing that is very distant but also very personal," says anthropologist Neta Bar. "I would even…
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What do we know about orgasms?
bsp; Science knows which people are more likely to fake orgasms and those in love are among them. Masculine men give women more orgasms and women usually fake orgasms to stop a guy from straying. You can tell how much a woman orgasms by looking at her face, observing how she walks and whether she likes politics. You can be allergic to orgasms. They don't induce labor in pregnant women but they can cause a seizure. One in four men…
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What TV shows are we most drawn to? Are they really the ones we say we enjoy?
bsp; We're drawn to content that stimulates us viscerally (like arguments) and watch more of it -- even if it's not as satisfying. Guess that explains the rise of reality TV: This paper investigates experimentally the effects of arousing content on viewing choices and satisfaction in television consumption. We test the hypothesis that the portrayal of arousing content combines high attraction and low satisfaction and is thus responsible for sub- optimal choices. In our experiment, subjects can choose among three…
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When life is on the line is it really “women and children first”?
the Titanic it held true: This paper explored the determinants of survival in a life and death situation created by an external and unpredictable shock. We are interested to see whether pro-social behaviour matters in such extreme situations. We therefore focus on the sinking of the RMS Titanic as a quasi-natural experiment do provide behavioural evidence which is rare in such a controlled and life threatening event. The empirical results support that social norm such as “women and children…
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Do you get your musical taste from your parents?
searchers found clear connections between the music parents enjoyed and what their adolescent kids liked: In this article, the continuity in music taste from parents to their children is discussed via a multi-actor design. In our models music preferences of 325 adolescents and both their parents were linked, with parental and adolescent educational level as covariates. Parents' preferences for different types of music that had been popular when they were young were subsumed under the general labels of Pop, Rock…
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Can reaching for the sky make you happier?
e connection between "up" and "happy" and "down" and "sad" goes deeper than we might think. Activating the mental metaphor of "up" can cause you to think happier thoughts and recollect more positive memories: Via Science Daily: Moving marbles upward caused participants to remember more positive life experiences, and moving them downward to remember more negative experiences, according to Daniel Casasanto (MPI and Donders Institute, Nijmegen) and Katinka Dijkstra (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). 'Meaningless' motor actions can make people remember the…
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Does watching a movie with a friend make you more likely to agree on how good it is?
s. Experiencing something with a friend makes the two of you more likely to agree on your impression of it: Two studies examine differences in participants’ moment‐to‐moment and retrospective evaluations of an experience depending on whether they are alone or in the presence of another person. Findings support our hypotheses that joint consumption leads to similar patterns or “coherence” in moment‐to‐moment evaluations and that greater coherence leads to more positive retrospective evaluations. We trace the emergence of coherence to processes…
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