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Can one bad apple really make that much of a difference?:
s: In a world where encounters with dishonesty are frequent, it is important to know if exposure to other people's unethical behavior can increase or decrease an individual's dishonesty. In Experiment 1, our confederate cheated ostentatiously by finishing a task impossibly quickly and leaving the room with the maximum reward. In line with social-norms theory, participants' level of unethical behavior increased when the confederate was an in-group member, but decreased when the confederate was an out-group member. In Experiment 2,…
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Is there a downside to being bilingual?:
pretty minor one; you're more likely to get words stuck "on the tip of your tongue": Bilinguals' virtually doubled processing load could lead to general difficulty producing all word forms or to difficulty only in specific conditions. In Experiment 1, bilinguals and monolinguals completed diaries of naturally occurring tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs), and in Experiment, 2 Spanish-English bilinguals and monolinguals produced the names of pictured objects and people's names given their descriptions. Bilinguals reported the same number (or fewer) TOTs…
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Does the shade of an African-American woman’s skin have an important effect on her life?:
she wants to get married it might: The inter-racial marriage gap that opened in the past 50 years is generally attributed to a decline in the availability of young black marriageable men. We contend that the associated shortage of desirable men in the marriage market provides those black men who are sought after with the opportunity to attain a high status spouse, which has placed a premium on black women with lighter skin. We provide evidence, based on data…
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Do bookmakers possess superior skills to bettors in predicting outcomes?:
pe: In this paper we test the hypothesis that bookmakers display superior skills to bettors in predicting the outcome of sporting events by using matched data from traditional bookmaking and person-to-person exchanges. Employing a conditional logistic regression model on horse racing data from the UK we find that, in high liquidity betting markets, betting exchange odds have more predictive value than the corresponding bookmaker odds. To control for potential spillovers between the two markets, we repeat the analysis for cases…
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How well do your friends know you?
out as well as you know yourself: Many people assume that they know themselves better than anyone else knows them. Recent research on inaccuracies in self-perception, however, suggests that self-knowledge may be more limited than people typically assume. In this article, the authors examine the possibility that people may know a person as well as (or better than) that person knows himself or herself. In Study 1, the authors document the strength of laypeople's beliefs that the self is the…
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Does pessimism soften the blow of bad news?
s, but it's not worth it: Although negative expectations may have the benefit of softening the blow when a negative event occurs, they also have the cost of making people feel worse while they are waiting for that event to happen. Three studies suggest that the cost of negative expectations is greater than the benefit. In 2 laboratory experiments and a field study, people felt worse when they were expecting a negative than a positive event; but once the event…
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Does forgetfulness mean you have a good memory?
some types of forgetting, yes: It has recently been suggested (Anderson, 2003) that forgetting is an adaptive process arising from successful inhibition of unwanted items, rather than arising from a failure of the memory system. This inhibition process is thought to make use of retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). In the present study, individual susceptibility to RIF was measured in a group of 40 normal participants, whose RIF scores were then compared with their scores on the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ).…
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Do deaf signers ever get words stuck on the “tip of their fingers”?
s: The "tip of the fingers" phenomenon (TOF) for sign language parallels the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon (TOT) for spoken language. During a TOF, signers are sure they know a sign but cannot retrieve it. Although some theories collapse semantics and phonology in sign language and thus predict that TOFs should not occur, TOFs were elicited in the current study. Like TOTs, TOFs often resolve spontaneously, commonly involve targets that are proper names, and frequently include partial access to…
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