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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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by Celeste Biever in New Scientist "THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions....
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by Natalie Angier in The New York Times "The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage...
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by Evan Lerner in Seed Magazine "When Max Lugavere and Jason Silva met at the University of Miami, they were two young idealists who found common ground in film, psychology, and philosophy. But when Al Gore announced his plans to start a TV network powered by a worldwide legion of socially minded...
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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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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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(A Collaborative Project of the Institute for 21st Century Agoras) "The Talking Point is all about how people learn within groups. People can be much smarter than crowds if you measure “smart” as decision-making speed. Crowds can be much wiser than individuals if you measure wisdom by depth of understanding...
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Jennifer R. Henretty, Heidi M. Levitt Over 90% of therapists self-disclose to clients (Mathews, 1989; Pope, Tabachnick, & Keith-Spiegel, 1987; Edwards & Murdock, 1994), however, the implications of therapist self-disclosure are unclear, with highly divergent results from one study to the next...
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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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In this chapter we examine how effective leadership varies across national and cultural boundaries. Specifically, we ask what elements of leadership are core and more universal across these boundaries? The foundation of our approach is the notion that organizations and societies have implicit leadership...
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Joan Y. Chiao , Tokiko Harada , Hidetsugu Komeda , Zhang Li , Yoko Mano , Daisuke Saito , Todd B. Parrish , Norihiro Sadato and Tetsuya Iidaka People living in multicultural environments often encounter situations which require them to acquire different cultural schemas and to switch between these cultural...
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Jorge F. del Valle, Amaia Bravo, Mónica López The authors carried out an assessment of social support networks with a sample of 884 Spanish adolescents aged 12 to 17. The main goal was to analyze the development of the figures of parents and peers as providers of social support in the two basic dimensions...
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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...