Search (2504)
You just committed murder. What should you do now?
u may want to know how long it takes to dissolve a body. Some insight on how to reduce that aggression level of yours could be useful and along those lines, guys, you should definitely stay away from guns -- unless you use them a lot, that is. (Honestly, there may not be much you can do; you and your family may all have serious brain problems. I'm guessing you were probably a pretty fearless kid.) Now there are some…
4 minutes
Are women more risk-averse than men? If so, why?
peated studies have shown males are less risk-averse than females, and this difference seems to be part of the reason for the male-female wage gap: We use a Colombian TV game show to test gender differences in competitive behavior where there is no opportunity for discrimination and females face no gender specific external constraints. Each game started with six contestants who had to answer general knowledge questions in private. There were five rounds of questions and, at the end of…
5 minutes
How can you give your relationship a booster shot?
ow gratitude: Gratitude and indebtedness are differently valenced emotional responses to benefits provided, which have implications for interpersonal processes. Drawing on a social functional model of emotions, we tested the roles of gratitude and indebtedness in romantic relationships with a daily-experience sampling of both members of cohabiting couples. As hypothesized, the receipt of thoughtful benefits predicted both gratitude and indebtedness. Men had more mixed emotional responses to benefit receipt than women. However, for both men and women, gratitude from interactions…
1 min read
What happens when nonsmokers wear nicotine patches?
e subjective experience of nicotine, which may be influenced by personality traits as well as environmental factors, may be important for understanding the factors associated with the initiation and maintenance of nicotine dependence. The present study examined the effects of 7 mg transdermal nicotine among a relatively large sample (n = 91; 44 women) of college-aged nonsmokers. Using a placebo controlled, double-blind, within-subjects design, nicotine’s effects were examined at rest and again after participants completed a sustained attention task. Sex…
1 min read
Do artists truly see the world differently than others?
t historians, artists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have long asserted that artists perceive the world differently than nonartists. Although empirical research on the nature and correlates of skilled drawing is limited, the available evidence supports this view: artists outperform nonartists on visual analysis and form recognition tasks and their perceptual advantages are correlated with and can be largely accounted for by drawing skill. The authors propose an integrative model to explain these results, derived from research in psychology and cognitive neuroscience…
1 min read
Does marrying for love (vs marrying for money) improve the economy?
cieties are characterized by customs governing the allocation of non-market goods such as marital partnerships. We explore how such customs affect the educational investment decisions of young singles and the subsequent joint labor supply decisions of partnered couples. We consider two separate matching paradigms—one where partners marry for money and the other where partners marry for romantic reasons orthogonal to productivity or debt. Whereas marrying for money generates greater investment efficiency, romantic matching, by increasing the number of educated and…
1 min read
Why politics is a mess and it’s all your fault:
posted before about how shallow we are when it comes to politics. Let's bang the drum again, shall we? We sure do like beautiful politicians: Are beautiful politicians more likely to be elected? To test this, we use evidence from Australia, a country in which voting is compulsory, and in which voters are given ‘How to Vote’ cards depicting photos of the major party candidates as they arrive to vote. Using raters chosen to be representative of the electorate,…
9 minutes
Are oldest, middle or youngest kids the biggest risk takers?
ddle children are the biggest risk takers in terms of birth order (which surprised me -- I would have guessed youngest): We analyze the impacts of birth order and presence/absence of siblings on risk preferences with respect to economic, health/safety, and sport/lifestyle related risks. We study both the answer to a hypothetical lottery question and stated risky behavior and find that middle-borns are consistently less risk averse than others irrespective of the type of risk. Moreover, the answer to the…
2 minutes
