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...

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...

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...

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...

By Rob Sharp from The Independent. "You sit cross-legged on a bamboo mat, soften your breathing and attempt to extract solace from the wisdom of one of the world's great philosophers. You read aloud from a recent translation of his work: "Learning from books as we grow from childhood to...

Founded on the Wisdom research of Elle Allison, Ph.D, Renewal Coaching is sponsoring a conference in Albuquerque NM on March 19-24 (come for two day increments of for all six days). The first two days (March 19-20) are for leaders at all levels who want to add coaching as an approach to their management...

by Ray Tallis from New Scientist "Most neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest...

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...

by Clive Thompson from Wired Magazine "Can you persuade someone to like a product by telling them that it’s popular? Do teenagers like Taylor Swift because she’s good or because everyone else they know likes her — so hey, she must be good, right? Sociologist Robert Merton dubbed this tendency to...

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...

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...

Leslie E. Anderson Parties can be a crucial to democratic function but not all parties or party systems are democratic. Some parties are fully competitive within a pluralist system while others, notably hegemonic parties, are antithetical to democracy. Between competitive, pluralist party systems and...

Kristen Renwick Monroea, William Chiua, Adam Martina and Bridgette Portman We contribute to a greater understanding of political psychology by 1) collecting data in a more systematic way for the intellectual community, 2) sensitizing students to the extent to which any intellectual discipline is socially...

Colin Campbell The concept of agency, although central to many sociological debates, has remained frustratingly elusive to pin down. This article is an attempt to open up what has been called the "black box" of personal agency by distinguishing clearly between two contrasting conceptions of...

Francois Collet In this article, I revisit Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and contrast it with Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality. Through a discussion of the literature of economic sociology on status and Fligstein's political-cultural approach, I argue that this concept...

By: Monique M. H. Pollman and Catrin Finkenauer Understanding is at the heart of intimate relationships. It is unclear, however, whether understanding—partners’ subjective feeling that they understand each other—or knowledge—partners’ accurate knowledge of each other—is more important for relationship...

by Jeremy Taylor "Renowned dream expert Jeremy Taylor can help you discover how the hidden messages in your dreams can change your life. In The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap Into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life, Taylor shows us how dreams can be the keys to gaining insight...

Carla Bagnoli This article argues that immoralists do not fully enjoy autonomous agency because they are not capable of engaging in the proper form of practical reflection, which requires relating to others as having equal standing. An adequate diagnosis of the immoralist’s failure of agential authority...

by Wade Davis "Over the past decade, many of us have been alarmed to learn of the rapidly accelerating extinction of our planet's diverse flora and fauna. But how many of us know that our human cultural diversity is also going extinct at a shocking rate? Biologists estimate that 18% of mammals...

Francesca Grippa and Peter A. Gloor We measured interpersonal perception accuracy by focusing on the relationship between actors’ centrality and their ability to accurately report their social interactions. We used the network measures of actors’ betweenness centrality and degree centrality to identify...

At the Defining Wisdom Network Meeting in June 2009, participants were asked to come up with a series of questions about wisdom that might shed light on the broad issues of our project. One participant asked the following question: “Has the world become more or less wise in the last 50 years? Or is the...

I just came back from our first conference of “wisdom scholars” in Chicago, and was fascinated by the topics that the wisdom grant winners are investigating. I thought I would try to blog about a topic that allowed me to mention several of them. Wisdom commonly is thought of as something that one accumulates...