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How many people have ever lived on Earth?
in over 320,000 readers. Get a free weekly update via email here. Related posts: New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert
1 min read
You know why the crime rate is down? Drugs.
ll, psychiatric drugs, that is: In this paper we consider possible links between the advent and diffusion of a number of new psychiatric pharmaceutical therapies and crime rates. We describe recent trends in crime and review the evidence showing mental illness as a clear risk factor both for criminal behavior and victimization. We then briefly summarize the development of a number of new pharmaceutical therapies for the treatment of mental illness which diffused during the “great American crime decline.” We…
4 minutes
Afraid of losing your job? Then you need to be.
ing afraid of losing your job turns out to be a strong predictor of actually losing your job: This article examines whether subjective expectations of unemployment are reliable indicators of the probability of becoming unemployed and investigates their association with wage growth. We find that workers fears of unemployment are increased by their previous unemployment experience and by the unemployment experiences of a close friend, and are associated with other objective indicators of insecure jobs. We then show that unemployment…
1 min read
Is a team only as strong as its weakest link?
s. Team trust is not determined by an average of the members, it's at the level of the least trusted member: In a team negotiation context, the authors empirically explored how judgments of team-level trust are derived from individual-level trust. Basing their argument on both the negativity bias and the discontinuity effect, the authors posit that people will focus most on the least trustworthy individual member of a team when making judgments about collective team-level trust. Findings from two studies…
1 min read
What we’ve learned from 77,000 terrorist incidents in 36 years:
parently, not a damn thing: Social and behavioral research on terrorism has expanded dramatically. However, theoretical work that incorporates terrorism and collection of valid data on it has lagged behind theoretical work on other criminological subjects. Theorizing has been dominated by deterrence perspectives. Threats of severe consequence for terrorist acts in general show little promise, but there is evidence that increasing the certainty of consequences works in some situations. Research on terrorism will be improved if it moves beyond deterrence…
1 min read
Who should you hire?
ve posted earlier on how to get a job. But what about for employers? Oddly enough, right now can be a hard time to be hiring. Why? You're flooded with applicants. Normally it's pretty easy to sort the rockstars from the losers. With double digit unemployment there's a lot of noise. So what do we know about hiring the right people and avoiding the wrong ones? 1) First and foremost, here's Bob Sutton's excellent post summarizing a study of 85…
5 minutes
Do song lyrics affect behavior?
s: Previous research has shown that exposure to prosocial songsincreased the accessibility of prosocial thoughts, led to moreinterpersonal empathy, and fostered helping behavior. However,inasmuch as cognition, affect, and behavior were measured indifferent studies, it remained unclear what variable constitutedthe mediating path from media exposure to action. This was testedin the present research. In four studies, listening to songswith prosocial, relative to neutral, lyrics increased helpingbehavior. This effect was mediated by interpersonal empathy.The results are consistent with the general learning model…
1 min read
Does Alcoholics Anonymous make you jittery and give you lung cancer?
, but members do drink more coffee and smoke more cigarettes than most people: Background: Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) members represent an important and relatively understudied population for improving our understanding of alcohol dependence recovery as over 1 million Americans participate in the program. Further insight into coffee and cigarette use by these individuals is necessary given AA members' apparent widespread consumption and the recognized health consequences and psychopharmacological actions of these substances.Methods: Volunteers were sought from all open-AA meetings in…
2 minutes
