Abortion is not a contentious issue in America these days - campaign platforms primarily center on differences in taxation and the scope of government but, for the most part, abortion for the left and the 2nd Amendment for the right are really only invoked to whip the fringes into a frenzy. read...
read moreI don't like SpongeBob SquarePants. I generally regard any parent who does like SpongeBob SquarePants with suspicion and derision; they probably watch "Real Housewives of Fresno" or whatever city that show is down to now.So when I see an article claiming SpongeBob is bad for kids and I may have a reason to ban that porifera from the house, it has a certain truthiness to it and so I let...
read moreA group of people are joining together for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center to discover whether their 'collective intention' can bring peace to the world.What does that even mean? The 9/11 Intention Experiment is the latest of 23 Web-based experiments carried out by author Lynne McTaggart to try and test the power of thought to change...
read moreCan we get three cheers for psychology? The bulk of the quality researchers in the field have consistently been under fire because of researchers like Satoshi Kanazawa and Marc Hauser but have started taking their discipline back.Circling the wagons around researchers was never a good idea but, well, things happen and psychologists are people too. Yet over the last year they have...
read moreWhy would Mohamed Atta graciously let a car rental agent know the check oil light was on in the car he returned and then help crash a plane full of people and fuel into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, an act of simple religious hatred?It's a puzzle of psychology. The ability to deal kindly with people on an individual level and then demonize them when they are in a group has been...
read moreThere's long been a maddening belief by a subset of psychologists who have never actually been to the Eastern part of the world that Asia is some collectivist Utopia.When it comes to inflated self-importance - hubris, even - some research contends, there is more of it in the west because Western culture prides itself on independence, personal success and uniqueness while in the East where harmony...
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