The reality, then, appears straightforward: our friends strongly shape our behavior. We imagine ourselves as individuals, responsible for our own choices and emotions, but that sense of independence is a romantic myth. There is no wall between people.
Social Determinism – Jonah Lehrer – Front Cortex
Exporting waste illegally to poor countries has become a vast and growing international business, as companies try to minimize the costs of new environmental laws, like those here, that tax waste or require that it be recycled or otherwise disposed of in an environmentally responsible way.
Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe, has unwittingly become Europe’s main external garbage chute, a gateway for trash bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa. There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European law may be simply burned or left to rot, polluting air and water and releasing the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.
Smuggling Europe’s Waste to Poorer Countries - by Elisabeth Rosenthal – The New York Times
Mahzarin Banaji doesn’t fit anybody’s ideal of a racist. A psychology professor at Yale University, she studies stereotypes for a living. And as a woman and a member of a minority ethnic group, she has felt firsthand the sting of discrimination. Yet when she took one of her own tests of unconscious bias. “I showed very strong prejudices,” she says. “It was truly a disconcerting experience.” And an illuminating one. When Banaji was in graduate school in the early 1980s, theories about stereotypes were concerned only with their explicit expression: outright and unabashed racism, sexism, anti-Semitism. But in the years since, a new approach to stereotypes has shattered that simple notion. The bias Banaji and her colleagues are studying is something far more subtle, and more insidious: what’s known as automatic or implicit stereotyping, which, they find, we do all the time without knowing it. Though out-and-out bigotry may be on the decline, says Banaji, “if anything, stereotyping is a bigger problem than we ever imagined.”
Where Bias Begins: The Truth about Stereotypes – by Annie Murphy Paul – Psychology Today
Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities. Eight-month-old babies were shown a box full of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: mostly white but with some red ones mixed in. The babies were more surprised, and looked longer and more intently at the experimenter when four red balls and one white ball were taken out of the box — a possible, yet improbable outcome — than when four white balls and a red one were produced.
Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think – by Alison Gopnik – The New York Times
Is your right parahippocampal gyrus feeling a little tired? Then maybe you should stop being such a sarcastic smart ass. It turns out that this obscure brain area, tucked deep inside the right hemisphere, is largely responsible for the detection of sarcasm, a rather sophisticated element of social cognition
The Anatomy of Sarcasm – by Jonah Lehrer – The Frontal Cortex
When the Viaduct de Millau opened in the south of France in 2004, this tallest bridge in the world won worldwide accolades. German newspapers described how it “floated above the clouds” with “elegance and lightness” and “breathtaking” beauty. In France, papers praised the “immense” “concrete giant.” Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power? Lera Boroditsky thinks not.
A psychologist at Stanford University, she has long been intrigued by an age-old question whose modern form dates to 1956, when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asked whether the language we speak shapes the way we think and see the world. If so, then language is not merely a means of expressing thought, but a constraint on it, too. Although philosophers, anthropologists, and others have weighed in, with most concluding that language does not shape thought in any significant way, the field has been notable for a distressing lack of empiricism—as in testable hypotheses and actual data.
What’s in a Word? – by Sharon Begley – Newsweek
It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin, every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity. But according to Vittrup’s entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles—like “Everybody’s equal” or “God made all of us” or “Under the skin, we’re all the same”—but they’d almost never called attention to racial differences.
They wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But Vittrup’s first test of the kids revealed they weren’t colorblind at all. Asked how many white people are mean, these children commonly answered, “Almost none.” Asked how many blacks are mean, many answered, “Some,” or “A lot.” Even kids who attended diverse schools answered the questions this way.
See Baby Discriminate – By Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman – Newsweek
magine your neighbor has a dog that regularly escapes her yard. One day you see the dog escape and return it to her. She thanks you by giving you a piece of delicious home-made apple pie. This happens several days in a row. Then one day when you return the dog, there’s no pie, no thanks, and no explanation. Would you return the dog the next time it escapes?
You might be disinclined. But what if there had never been any reward? Wouldn’t returning her dog be the right thing to do?
Does rewarding altruism squelch it? – by Dave Munger – Cognitive Daily
What is the mind’s default position: are we naturally critical or naturally gullible? As a species do we have a tendency to behave like Agent Mulder from the X-Files who always wanted to believe in mythical monsters and alien abductions? Or are we like his partner Agent Scully who was the critical scientist, generating alternative explanations, trying to understand and evaluate the strange occurrences they encountered rationally?
Do we believe what the TV, the newspapers, blogs even, tell us at first blush or are we naturally critical? Can we ignore the claims of adverts, do we lap up what politicians tell us, do we believe our lover’s promises?
THE “war” between science and religion is notable for the amount of civil disobedience on both sides. Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight. Whether out of a live-and-let-live philosophy, or a belief that religion and science are actually compatible, or a heartfelt indifference to the question, they’re choosing to sit this one out.
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I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.
A Grand Bargain Over Evolution – by Robert Wright – The New York Times
In 1965 H.H. Kornhuber and L. Deeke found that brain activity precedes a conscious choice (voluntarily pressing a button) by 500 to 1,000 milliseconds. But in 1983 a team led by B. Libet found that when people were asked when they consciously decided to press a button, they said their decision came about 200 milliseconds before pressing it — after their brain had started to process the task.
So did you “decide” to read this post after your brain had already committed to clicking on the link? It’s possible, but it’s also possible that there’s simply a lag between when you were aware of having made a decision and when you actually decided.
“Free choice” may not be as free as it seems – by Dave Munger – Cognitive Daily
But perhaps the reason they enjoyed their time so much was precisely because it was limited. While a vacation in the tropics seems fabulous, getting stranded on a tropical island — even with plenty of food and water — can be terrifying. And while most of us live comfortable day-to-day lives with good friends and family, how often do we stop to appreciate our own good fortune? It’s certainly plausible that placing limits on enjoyable activities can end up making us happier.
Focusing on how little time you have left can make you happier – by Dave Munger – Cognitive Daily
In a world where useful and important answers come looking for you, it is the idea of unimportance that is the primary selling point of the miscellanies. The books promise to guide the reader somewhere older and slower, to create a little world in which information can serve as amusement rather than currency. A carefully done miscellany appears random, but it achieves a sort of quiet intellectual bustle, set apart from the roar of the daily info-chaos. The miscellanies are information as art, and art for art’s sake.
The curious appeal of miscellanea – By Tom Scocca – The Boston Globe
We tend to think that group decisions average out the preferences of participants so they would come up with something closer to the Ford Focus. But the psychological research doesn’t support this conclusion. In fact group discussions tend to polarize groups so that, rather than people’s views always being averaged, their initial preferences can become exaggerated and their final position is often more extreme than it was initially.
Group Polarization: The Trend to Extreme Decisions – PsyBlog
In the decades since I first encountered the French language, researchers have begun to come to a consensus on the utility of gendered words: they help listeners to predict what word is coming next, and therefore aid comprehension. For example, “où est le livre?” means “where is the book?” and “où est la lingerie?” means something entirely different. It could be extremely important to distinguish between the two possible phrases, if, say, they were whispered in your ear at a crowded party.
Studies have found that native speakers of languages with gendered nouns are quicker at identifying objects with different-gender names than the same-gender names. For example, if a Spanish speaker was presented with a picture of a ball (la pelota) and a shoe (el zapato), then she would react faster to the phrase “Encuentra la pelota” (find the ball), compared to when the ball was paired with a cookie (la galeta). “La” immediately distinguishes a pelota from a zapato but not a galeta
La raison I had to learn gendered articles in French class – by Dave Munger – Cognitive Daily