Psychology:
New Agers are more delusional permlink
Category: Culture
Relative to atheists, and conventional religious people (though conventional religious people are more delusional than atheists). Tom Rees has more: Overall, the New Agers were more delusional than the Religious. That was particularly true for belief in witchcraft and telepathy...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:56 PM • 18 Comments •
Does the pill matter? permlink
Category: Culture
Eric Michael Johnson has a post up, Does Taking Birth Control Alter Women's Sexual Choices?, where he surveys a new paper,Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?. Eric notes: The concern of the researchers is that a woman...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:17 AM • 14 Comments •
Going for the pain of paying permlink
Category: Culture
For Gun-Shy Consumers, Debit Is Replacing Credit: Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company's history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 6:59 PM • 1 Comments •
Religion & cognitive neuroscience permlink
Category: Religion
Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity: We hypothesized that religiosity, a set of traits variably expressed in the population, is modulated by neuroanatomical variability. We tested this idea by determining whether aspects of religiosity were predicted by variability in regional cortical volume....
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:56 AM • 9 Comments •
Your neuro-personality in graphics permlink
Category: Cognitive Science
The Neurocritic points me to a paper, The brain structural disposition to social interaction: Social reward dependence (RD) in humans is a stable pattern of attitudes and behaviour hypothesized to represent a favourable disposition towards social relationships and attachment as...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 9:16 AM • 0 Comments •
Predictably Irrational, behavioral economics in 13 chapters permlink
Category: Culture
I first encountered Dan Ariely on the radio show Marketplace, where he offers up little nuggets of research data from the new field of behavioral economics. Because of the individual scale of the research many of Ariely's findings have some...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 9:16 AM • 34 Comments •
Jake Young & myself on bloggingheads.tv permlink
Category: Culture
The episode is titled "your brains & your genes." There's more emphasis on economics than you think....
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:52 PM • 3 Comments •
The biological roots of moral sentiments? permlink
Category: Psychology
David Brooks has a new column grandly titled The End of Philosophy. Heather Mac Donald at Secular Right chides him for his criticism of the New Atheists, while John Derbyshire offers guarded praise. It seems to me that the jab...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 11:42 AM • 2 Comments •
God makes you chill permlink
Category: Psychology
Neural Markers of Religious Conviction: Many people derive peace of mind and purpose in life from their belief in God. For others, however, religion provides unsatisfying answers. Are there brain differences between believers and nonbelievers? Here we show that religious...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 2:41 PM • 10 Comments •
Crime & punishment & Madoff permlink
Category: Psychology
Even Bernard Madoff Doesn't Deserve This:Remember Jeffrey Skilling? Losses to Enron shareholders of more than $1 billion largely determined his 24-year-plus sentence. Or consider WorldCom's former chief, Bernard J. Ebbers. He got 25 years based principally on the $2.2 billion...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 12:10 AM • 12 Comments •