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How to tell which countries are corrupt… by looking at traffic tickets:
study cultural norms and legal enforcement in controlling corruption by analyzing the parking behavior of United Nations officials in Manhattan. Until 2002, diplomatic immunity protected UN diplomats from parking enforcement actions, so diplomats’ actions were constrained by cultural norms alone. We find a strong effect of corruption norms: diplomats from high‐corruption countries (on the basis of existing survey‐based indices) accumulated significantly more unpaid parking violations. In 2002, enforcement authorities acquired the right to confiscate diplomatic license plates of violators.…
1 min read
Does terrorism work?:
dly, yes: This paper examines whether terrorism is an effective tool to achieve political goals. By exploiting variation in terror attacks over time and across locations in Israel from 1988 to 2006, we show that local terror attacks cause Israelis to be: (i) more willing to grant territorial concessions to the Palestinians; (ii) more willing to accept a Palestinian state; (iii) and less likely to identify oneself as being right-wing. These effects are especially pronounced within demographic groups that are…
1 min read
How to avoid becoming senile:
n't retire. You know the old expression, "Use it or lose it?" It's correct. Nobody's saying you need to do back-breaking work until you're 94 but retirement often involves too little mental stimulation and that can hasten mental decline: Some studies suggest that people can maintain their cognitive abilities through "mental exercise." This has not been unequivocally proven. Retirement is associated with a large change in a person's daily routine and environment. In this paper, the authors propose two mechanisms…
1 min read
Do you hear sarcasm better through your left ear?:
dly enough, yes: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the processing of sincere and sarcastic statements by the cerebral hemispheres. Forty right-handed students were asked to localize sincere and sarcastic statements presented dichotically. Participants either indicated the ear that perceived the sarcastic statement or the ear that perceived the sincere statement in counterbalanced blocks of trials. As expected, results revealed a left ear advantage for sarcastic statements and a right ear advantage for sincere statements. In addition,…
1 min read
Why do we blame the victim?:
want to believe the world is fair and just. It's too depressing to think otherwise, right? When we see terrible things happen to innocent people, it's much easier to believe that it's the person's fault than to radically shift our worldview: This study investigated the impact of self-construal levels on people’s tendency to blame innocent victims for the victims’ fates. The authors hypothesized that when the belief in a just world is threatened, social self-construal is associated with more…
1 min read
How do you get a presidential pardon?
d you get wild and crazy last night? Murder a half dozen people who didn't deserve it? It happens to the best of us. So how are you going to avoid the chair? Presidents can write those get-out-of-jail-free cards called pardons. But how to snag one? You're in luck! Now is a good time. Democratic presidents grant more pardons, more pardons are granted when crime is low and the number of pardons increases during wartime. (If you want to skip…
2 minutes
I’m 100% certain you’ll read this post:
have an irrational attraction to certainty and that's reflected in our love of "100%." Even when we're presented with equivalents, we prefer things that have 100% attached to them: People overweight certainty, even when certainty is only an illusion. A vaccine that was described as 100% effective against 70% of disease targets was preferred to one described as 70% effective against 100% of disease targets (Studies 1 and 2). The appeal of 100% extends beyond the probability attribute. In…
1 min read
Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky lectures on the science behind human sexuality (Video):
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
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