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by David Munger from Seed Magazine "Medical writer Tom Rees devotes his blog Epiphenom to the scientific study of religion. Last week he examined a study on the relationship between intelligence and religious belief. Published in Social Psychology Quarterly , this study by Satoshi Kanazawa replicated...
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by Adam Hadhazy from Scientific American "As Olympians go for the gold in Vancouver, even the steeliest are likely to experience that familiar feeling of "butterflies" in the stomach. Underlying this sensation is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive...
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by Melinda Wenner from Scientific American " Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing—it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social...
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"Barabási mathematically describes networks in the World Wide Web, the internet, the human body, and society at large. Fowler seeks to identify the social and biological links that define us as humans. In this video Salon, Barabási and Fowler discuss contagion and the Obama campaign, debate the...
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by Philip Ball from Nature News "Medieval monarchies might not have had many things to recommend them compared with liberal democracies, but here's one: our rulers have no Fools. How often now will a national leader employ someone to laugh at their folly and remind them of bitter truths? More...
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By Richard E. Cytowic in Seed Magazine "From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention...
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from TED "MacArthur winner Sendhil Mullainathan uses the lens of behavioral economics to study a tricky set of social problems -- those we know how to solve, but don't. We know how to reduce child deaths due to diarrhea, how to prevent diabetes-related blindness and how to implement solar-cell...
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by David Roberts from Grist "When it comes to energy, policymakers are often confronted with human behavior that seems irrational, unpredictable, or unmanageable. Advocates for energy efficiency in particular are plagued by the gap between what it would make sense for people to do and what they...
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by Janelle Weaver for Wired Science "Social butterflies who shine at parties may get their edge from special genes that make them experts at recognizing faces. Scientists have found the strongest evidence to date that genes govern how well we keep track of who’s who. The findings suggest that face...
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by Ed Yong and Alice Fishburn from Seed Magazine "Imagine if you could rewrite your mind as quickly as a document on your computer. No more painful memories, no phobias or ingrained fears, just a blank slate where the scars that mark each human life used to be. This may sound like the stuff of Hollywood...
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Daniel M. Hausman and Brynn Welch One of the hottest ideas in current policy debates is “libertarian paternalism,” the design of policies that push individuals toward better choices without limiting their liberty. In their recent book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and then Obama advisor (now head of the White...
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Stephen S. Hall "A compelling investigation into one of our most coveted and cherished ideals, and the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue. We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science...
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Stephan Schleim , Tade M. Spranger , Susanne Erk, Henrik Walter Various kinds of normative judgments are an integral part of everyday life. We extended the scrutiny of social cognitive neuroscience into the domain of legal decisions, investigating two groups, lawyers and other academics, during moral...
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Elizabeth Tricomi, Antonio Rangel, Colin F. Camerer, John P. O’Doherty A popular hypothesis in the social sciences is that humans have social preferences to reduce inequality in outcome distributions because it has a negative impact on their experienced reward. Although there is a large body of behavioural...
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Justin Greaves, Wyn Grant This article argues that interdisciplinary collaboration can offer significant intellectual gains to political science in terms of methodological insights, questioning received assumptions and providing new perspectives on subject fields. Collaboration with natural scientists...
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Peter Suedfeld, Rajiv Jhangiani Using integrative complexity scoring, the current study addresses how communications by leaders of India and Pakistan have revealed their information processing and decision-making strategies. The hostility between India and Pakistan started with the official creation...
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Marc Hauser and Justin Wood We synthesize the contrasting predictions of motor simulation and teleological theories of action comprehension and present evidence from a series of studies showing that monkeys and apes—like humans—extract the meaning of an event by ( a ) going beyond the surface appearance...
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Reka Daniel and Stefan Pollmann The dopaminergic system is known to play a central role in reward-based learning (Schultz, 2006), yet it was also observed to be involved when only cognitive feedback is given (Aron et al., 2004). Within the domain of information-integration category learning, in which...
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Christopher Hemond, Rachel M. Brown, Edwin M. Robertson Humans have a prodigious capacity to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Being distracted while, for example, performing a complex motor skill adds complexity to a task and thus leads to a performance impairment. Yet, it may not be just the presence...
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Susannah B. F. Paletz , Christian D. Schunn The psychology of science typically lacks integration between cognitive and social variables. We present a new framework of team innovation in multidisciplinary science and engineering groups that ties factors from both literatures together. We focus on the...