Search (2502)
Is your brother smart? Then you might be crazy.
lose relatives of successful students showed increased risks of psychosis." Background It has been suggested that psychosis genes mightbe associated with beneficial effects, explaining their highfrequency in all human populations. Aims To test the relationship between academic success and the incidence of psychotic disorders. Method The unusually complete demographic and scholastic records available in Iceland were used to locate academically accomplishedindividuals and assess the probability of previously identifiedpatients with mental disorders and their relatives being amongsuch groups. Results Close relatives…
1 min read
Does being close to your family make you less trusting?
..people with strong family ties have a lower level of trust in strangers than people with weak family ties, and argue that this association is causal." We provide direct evidence that people with strong family ties have a lower level of trust in strangers than people with weak family ties, and argue that this association is causal. We also investigate the mechanisms that underlie this effect, and provide evidence that these revolve around the level of outward exposure: factors that…
1 min read
What predicts whether men and women will fall in love?
n are more prone to falling in love if they overestimate women’s sexual interest and highly value looks. Women were more prone to falling in love if they had a stronger sex drive. A leading theory of romantic love is that it functions to make one feel committed to one’s beloved, as well as to signal this commitment to the beloved (Frank, 1988). Because women tend to be skeptical of men’s commitment, this view entails that men may have evolved…
2 minutes
What happens when the government subsidizes the pill for teenage girls?
is paper investigates the consequences of a series of Swedish policy changes beginning in 1989 where different regions started subsidizing the birth control pill. The reforms were significant and applied to all types of oral contraceptives. My identification strategy takes advantage of the fact that the reforms were implemented successively over time and targeted specific cohorts of young women, in particular teenagers. This generates plausibly exogenous variation in access to the subsidy. The paper first demonstrates that access significantly increased…
1 min read
Do rich guys give women more orgasms? (pt2)
d I mention I'm not a scientist? I'm just a guy who posts stuff he finds interesting on a website. So, caveat emptor, dear readers. In my post on what to look for in a marriage partner I said that rich guys give women more orgasms. And that's what the study showed. Well, turns out the study was wrong: In a recent article in this journal (Pollet and Nettle, 2009), we reported that women with higher-income partners reported more frequent…
2 minutes
Is there an upside to your kid being miserable?
e type of thinking promoted by happiness can impair attention to detail: Happiness is generally considered an emotion with only beneficial effects, particularly in childhood. However, there are some situations where the style of information processing triggered by happiness could be a liability. In particular, happiness seems to motivate a top-down processing style, which could impair performance when attention to detail is required. Indeed, in Experiment 1, 10- to 11-year-old children (N= 30) induced to feel a happy mood were…
1 min read
Is intelligence sexy?
men, absolutely and all the time: What role does a man's intelligence play in women's mate preferences? Selecting a more intelligent mate often provides women with better access to resources and parental investment for offspring. But this preference may also provide indirect genetic benefits in the form of having offspring who are in better physical condition, regardless of parental provisioning. Intelligence then may serve as both a cue of a mate's provisioning abilities and his overall heritable phenotypic quality.…
2 minutes
Can you pay people to develop good habits?
oks like the answer might be yes: Can incentives be effective when trying to encourage the development of good habits? We investigate the effect of paying people a non-trivial amount of money to attend an exercise facility a number of times during a one-month period. In two separate studies, we find that doing so leads to a large and significant increase in the average post-intervention attendance level relative to the control group. This result is entirely driven by the impact…
1 min read
