Study Claims Ogling Women Makes Them Worse at Math
I wonder what the first person to win two Nobel prizes, Madame Curie, would make of this study. Oh, I know the answer from a classic Simpsons episode … Stephanie Pappas writes on LiveScience:
Getting the once-over from a man causes women to score lower on a math test, a new study finds.
Despite this drop in performance, women were more motivated to interact with men who ogled them, perhaps because they were trying to boost their sense of belonging, psychologists report in the February issue of the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.
“It creates this vicious cycle for women in which they’re underperforming in math or work domains, but they’re continuing to want to interact with the person who is making them underperform in the first place,” study researcher Sarah Gervais, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, told LiveScience.
Why Rich Parents Don’t Matter
Interesting article from Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal:
How much do the decisions of parents matter? Most parents believe that even the most mundane acts of parenting — from their choice of day care to their policy on videogames — can profoundly influence the success of their children. Kids are like wet clay, in this view, and we are the sculptors.
Yet in tests measuring many traits, from intelligence to self-control, the power of the home environment pales in comparison to the power of genes and peer groups. We may think we’re sculptors, but the clay is mostly set.
A new paper suggests that both metaphors can be true. Which one is relevant depends, it turns out, on the economic status of families.
For a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia looked at 750 pairs of American twins who were given…
Why Legalizing Drugs — All of Them — Is the Only Forward Path For Black America
Interesting article from John McWhorter in the New Republic:
This should change, as I have argued frequently over the past year (listen to part of a speech I did on this here). Of the countless reasons why this revival of this Prohibition that looks so quaint in Boardwalk Empire should be erased with all deliberate speed, one is that with no War on Drugs there would be, within one generation, no “black problem” in the United States. Poverty in general, yes. An education problem in general — probably. But the idea that black America had a particular crisis would rapidly become history, requiring explanation to young people. The end of the War on Drugs is, in fact, what all people genuinely concerned with black uplift should be focused on, which is why I am devoting my last TNR post of 2010 to the issue. The black malaise in the U.S. is currently like a…
“If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I’ll Finally Be Loved” (Podcast)
Lloyd deMause: “If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I’ll Finally Be Loved”
Direct Download • RSS • Website
Are Palestinians sexually abused as children more often than people of other nationalities? Lloyd deMause, director of the Institute for Psychohistory, on Freedomain Radio.
Remembering JFK’s Assasination As A Death of Democracy
Site editor’s note: This post from DJ Pangburn originally appeared on death + taxes:
The Kennedy assassination and the conspiracies surrounding it are imbued with such meaning for Americans because the distortion radiating in waves almost immediately following the spectacle was the aftershock of a system convulsing in its own death.
I do not use the “death” metaphor in regards to the JFK assassination lightly, for death is no light matter. Follow me through the looking glass.
Oliver Stone taught an entire generation to invoke Cicero’s Senate speech when thinking about any event and the official version of such events, through the voice of the character X (based on Fletcher Prouty) in the movie “JFK.” He taught people that the “how and the who” is all scenery for the public, and the real questions are: why?, who benefits?, and who has the power to cover it up? ”Cui bono?” The greatest thing the filmmaker ever did was…
Reality TV in the Age of Credulity
Joseph Allen writes on Confessions of a CyberCasualty:
I recently got my foot smashed to hell while doing something stupid. Crippled and couchbound, I indulged the great American painkiller: Reality Television. That just made me more stupid.
We all know the Idiot Box is an insidious device. The TV snares your attention and lulls you into a passive stupor, polluting the subconscious with compulsive memes and corporate logos. It’s like getting blown by an android in a Wal-Mart stockroom. Yet there I was, swilling beers and letting Jersey Shore, American Idol, and truTV’s All Worked Up drown me under electromagnetic waves of human detritus.
Reverend Ron is a redneck repo man with a bleached flattop and cameras in his face. Ron cruises Lizard Lick, NC with Bobby the badass sidekick, reclaiming unpaid vehicles from ignorant white trash and whippin’ ass when necessary. That’s what All Worked Up is all about. Real people with detestable occupations,…
Controversial Charity Paying U.K. Drug Addicts £200 To Be Sterilized
Is it eugenics, bribery, or a clever way of fixing social dysfunction? A North Carolina-based charity is paying U.K. drug addicts to be sterilized, with the hope being that it will save money for the taxpayer in the long run. The idea went over swimmingly in the United States but is encountering resistance in Britain. BBC News reports:
The first person in the UK to accept the cash is drug addict “John” from Leicester who says he “should never be a father”.
The move has been criticised by some drug charities who work with addicts. Project Prevention founder Barbara Harris admitted her methods amounted to “bribery”, but said it was the only way to stop babies being physically and mentally damaged by drugs during pregnancy.
Mrs Harris set up her charity in North Carolina after adopting the children of a crack addict. Speaking to the BBC’s Inside Out programme, she said: “The birth mother…
Obama Derangement Syndrome: Yes It’s Racist
Here’s a sort of follow up to two earlier posts about subconscious racism and Obama Derangement Syndrome. Ira Rosofsky writes in Psychology Today:
Pollster Stanley Greenberg and political operative James Carville, last year, reported on a series of focus groups with older, white Republicans in Georgia. They were on a quest to understand the hardcore opposition to Obama. Is it racist?
They concluded no. They admonished us to “Get over it.” The animus to Obama, they claimed, is “based in the same unwavering, bedrock conservative principles that have always led them to oppose liberal policies. Some of their subjects even claim to be post racial-”proud” there is an African-American president.
I have my own informal focus group, and I’m not buying it.
I work as a psychologist in nursing homes, and I talk daily to the older salt of the earth. The other day I assessed the cognitive status of an 87-year-old male member of…
I’m Homeless and This Is Why I Have an iPad
Image: Sam Spratt / Gizmodo
This is really interesting, it’s not what you’d expect. Homeless in Paris writes on Gizmodo:
I’m homeless, very homeless, dirt broke and all, but I still own an iPad and a MSI Wind u130 netbook. These, I feel, are essential tools … Being without a home is not that big a deal in today’s world, but having connections to the rest of the world is pretty important.
Choice: I am homeless by choice, I gave away and sold all my belongings in Los Angeles and moved to Paris. My tourist visa is expired. I’m definitely not allowed to be here, but I still work when I want, and tend to pretty much live the life of Riley. But when I need to get in contact with someone, from a friend to the Paris transportation authority to complain about a misfared ticket, it’s hard to work without McDonald’s Wi-Fi.
The laptop…
You Might Be Racist and Not Even Know It
From ScienceDaily:
A new study from the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis looks at how much African Americans and whites favor or prefer their own racial group over the other, how much they identify with their own racial group, and how positively they feel about themselves.
The work, by Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology in the School of Science at IUPUI, looked at both consciously controllable sentiments and gut feelings about social stigma and found a significant difference in both groups between what people say they feel and their less controllable “gut feelings.”
“The Importance of Implicit and Explicit Measures for Understanding Social Stigma” appears in the current (September 2010) issue of the Journal of Social Issues.
Many studies of stigma have been conducted since the end of World War II but until recently they have looked primarily at explicit (recently learned) attitudes and did not include implicit measures…
The Short-Lived Glory Days of Nude Psychotherapy
Another great find from Cyriaque Lamar over at io9.com. How times have changed:
In 1967, psychologist Paul Bindrim introduced the world to the salubrious properties of naked psychotherapy. Despite the treatment’s somewhat lurid connotations and relative obscurity nowadays, nude psychotherapy did garner its share of press attention, professional consideration, and happy, naked adherents.
Bindrim’s theories were inspired by the famed psychologist Abraham Maslow (you know, the fellow with the hierarchy of needs) and focused on the acceptance of the naked body as a whole. This message wasn’t particularly unorthodox even if his methodology was. Historian Ian Nicholson describes Bindrim’s birthday suit treatments in his eminently readable paper “Baring the soul: Paul Bindrim, Abraham Maslow and ‘Nude psychotherapy”
Does Sexual Dysfunction in America Require Divine Intervention?
Via the First Church of Mutterhals:
I’m not very altruistic, as most of you already know. I’m of the opinion that it’s every man for himself, whether you like it or not. You can’t really expect other people to take care of you and security is just coping mechanism. No one is really secure.
However, I do find the sexual dysfunction of many Americans troubling enough to warrant intervention. You have a vast number of women who are downright latently asexual, you have shit-load of straight men who are terrified of the implication that they might be gay, you have teens and young adults being told in one ear that abstinence and chastity are the only way, while in the other ear streams the most vulgar and perverse sexuality in the form of festering silicone tits and hooker culture, which celebrates coldly detached sex acts but shies away from real sensuality and…
One Fifth Of American Adults Don’t Use The Internet
… according to a Pew study discussed in an insightful manner by Erick Schonfeld on TechCrunch. He is asking the fundamental question: Who are these folks who wouldn’t be reading this website, or any website for that matter, at all?
For me, since I happen to be able to remember a world without the internet, I remember first trying Mosaic in 1994 and thinking to myself this will change everything (hence my 2001 monolith image). Is it a matter of access or are there people who will never get online?
The Pew research center put out survey results on broadband adoption and Internet use in America. There was one data point that I found startling. According to the survey, 21 percent of American adults say they don’t use the Internet. One fifth of all Americans.
This isn’t just people who do not use broadband (which is 66 percent of American adults). It also includes…
Hierarchy Of Robot Needs
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of psychology’s most important theories regarding the search for happiness and self-actualization. Via Flickr, here it is adapted for robots:
The Virus
Tiny little robots of God adjusting life forms and controlling populations.
Take note on how you feel before and after a cold or flu are you the same you?
I think of the yearly cold and flu season as the viral update.
Many escape this natural cycle in life by getting inoculated.
Postponing death through education, in this case in the form of a weakened virus shot.
Thus bringing up the point of where do we draw the line at working with or against nature?
Viruses come in many forms including thoughts and ideas that are communicated to others.
One of the most well known of this type of virus is “Propaganda” this nasty little bugger
manipulates the masses in many ways, war, genocide, persecution,exploitation, enslavement,
and control of the general population. Fear is the basic fuel for this virus so by removing the fear you can starve the virus.
This can be done through education, by exposing the virus…
