mixingmemory

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April 21, 2007
This is the way it always works. I quit the nouveau atheist blogs cold turkey, and their nonsense starts popping up elsewhere so that I can't escape it. That's how I learned that some of them are now comparing their movement to the suffragists. The comparison seems to have been first made by Larry…
April 20, 2007
OK, this research is pretty silly, and quite frankly, I can't imagine what compelled the researchers to undertake it, but because it has to do with something I love, soccer, I feel compelled to blog about it. There this short report in the March issue of Psychological Science that I just got…
April 19, 2007
I have to admit that I've been avoiding the "framing science" discussion that's been going on in the science blogosphere recently, mostly because I'd rather talk about what framing is and how it works than two author's rather vague ideas about how to use framing in a particular area of discourse.…
April 19, 2007
In the recent dust up over "framing science," there's been more hand waving than any actual discussion of, you know, framing. However, I was struck by one point that fellow ScienceBlogger Matt Nisbet, one of the authors of the Science article that sparked this whole mess, made in comments to my…
April 14, 2007
I recently made my third attempt at Finnegan's Wake, and as with the first two, failed miserably. At some point I'm going to decide, once and for all, that I will never be able to read that God forsaken book. It helps that I heard this the other day (via The Valve). I figure if the author reads his…
April 10, 2007
Everyone should stop by and tell Richard of Philosophy, etcetera congratulations. He was accepted by pretty much every top analytical philosophy program in the U.S., and after a whirlwind tour of the states, has chosen Princeton. Richard's was one of the first blogs I read (and I think he was one…
April 10, 2007
As you all know, fellow ScienceBloggers Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney published an article in the April 6 issue of Science on the topic of "framing science." The article has sparked a great deal of (sometimes heated) debate on ScienceBlogs and off (Bora has a list of links, to which I'd add John…
April 6, 2007
This is just plain cool.
April 3, 2007
Sorry for the lack of posting lately. I've got some half-written posts that should be interesting, but between baseball 4 day a week, and an unhealthily large number of current research projects, I'm completely exhausted. So instead of finishing one of those half-written posts tonight, I'm just…
March 27, 2007
Some of you may find this book chapter interesting: Hauer, M.D., Young, L., & Cushman, F. (in press): Reviving Rawls' Linguistic Analogy: Operative principles and the causal structure of moral actions. In Moral Psychology and Biology.
March 27, 2007
Research on the role of emotion/intuition in moral judgments is really heating up. For decades (millennia, even), moral judgment was thought to be a conscious, principle-based process, but over the last few years, researchers have been showing that emotion and intuition, both of which operate…
March 26, 2007
When I was an undergrad, my intro psych professor mentioned research in industrial/organizational psychology indicating that the color red causes people to be happier and more productive, while blue makes people sadder and less productive. Later I was taught that the relationship between color and…
March 25, 2007
I have to do a little fatherly bragging. My son (#3) started playing baseball this year. He's 9, so he's starting a bit later -- much later than almost all of the players in his league. So he's got some catching up to do. Yesterday, I went to his first game. That's him out there in right field (…
March 18, 2007
With a paper by Freedberg and Gallese, to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, mirror neurons have made their way into neuroaesthetics (at some point, someone like Gallese will publish a paper arguing that mirror neurons explain everything, and we'll begin to wonder what the hell the rest…
March 14, 2007
I'm sure you've all long forgotten about the framing project that I discussed on this blog late last year, but in case someone out there remembers it, I wanted to give you an update. I still want to collect the category norms that I discussed. That is, I want to have people list features of…
March 13, 2007
It turns out that Jeremy of PsyBlog is currently running a study on music and personality in the UK. So if you're reading this, and you live on one of those islands, you should go here and participate.
March 12, 2007
Since we now know that a person's music says a lot about what that person's like, I thought I'd tell you a little bit about myself by sharing some of my music. I can't give you a list of my ten favorite songs (the data Rentfrow and Gosling used in their study), because to be honest, my favorite…
March 12, 2007
I went to a high school at a time (one not that different from most others, I imagine) when musical preferences were a good clue to social group membership. There were, for example, the punks who listened to, well, punk; the stoners who listened to Pink Floyd's "The Wall" over and over and over…
March 6, 2007
In the discussion that resulted from the last couple posts on religion, a lot of claims have been made, all of which are empirical claims, and all of which thereby require data. But of course, there's not a whole lot of data out there, and what is out there is easy to interpret in a variety of ways…
March 1, 2007
While I think it's obvious to anyone with eyes (a category that seems to grow smaller by the day) that within the anti-religious bigotry today there is an underlying feeling of superiority, an unliberal belittling of the little guy, a feeling that "Joe Schmoe" is stupid and to some extent worth…
February 28, 2007
Here's a nominee for strangest psychology experiment ever, or at least spookiest. Yesterday I talked about the theory that religion, or at least supernatural agent concepts, serve to activate representational concerns, and thus increase prosocial behavior, or decrease selfish behavior. The…
February 27, 2007
For my aquarium: The picture's from CNN. The caption reads: The Antarctic ice fish is one of many species documented during a 10-week expedition exploring the Antarctic sea floor. Researchers examined marine life and uncovered potentially new species below the surface of the cold Antarctic water.…
February 27, 2007
If you were hanging around ScienceBlogs yesterday, you probably came across this post at Pharyngula. In it, Dr. Myers links to an article on a study by Bushman et al.1 purporting to show that people are more aggressive after reading passages from the Bible in which God sanctions violence than after…
February 22, 2007
In a comment to the last post, "Korax" mentions a paper published online in Current Biology this week on chimpanzee tool use. The tool use described in this paper is, as far as I can tell, as or more complex than any previously witnessed in chimps. Here's the abstract: Although tool use is known to…
February 14, 2007
You've probably already come across this story, but just in case: Oldest chimp tools found in West Africa Apes could have passed down skills for thousands of years. In the West African rainforest, archaeologists have found ancient chimpanzee stone tools thousands of years older than the previous…
February 9, 2007
Here at Mixing Memory, Just Science week has turned into Mostly Wegner week. But the set of studies I'm going to talk about in this post has received so much attention that I just can't resist. You may have encountered it in the New York Times (you can read it here without a subscription).…
February 8, 2007
Here's something I didn't know1: Approximately 6 in every 100 words are affected by disfluency, including repetitions, corrections, and hesitations such as the fillers um and er. Moreover, the distribution of disfluency is not arbitrary. For example, fillers tend to occur before low frequency and…
February 7, 2007
A while back, I linked to a paper analogically comparing money to drugs. Judging by the comments, those of you who read the paper weren't particularly impressed by it. But if you thought the money-drug analogy was odd, I've got a better one for you. If you recall, the money as a drug paper by…
February 6, 2007
This isn't technically about science, but I wanted to remind everyone that the week of science challenge has begun (as of yesterday), and the Just Science webpage is aggregating the feeds of all the participating blogs. So if you're interested in reading a bunch of science blogging, including some…
February 6, 2007
Have you ever had a meeting, or a brain storming session, that involved a lot of coffee and enthusiasm, with everyone throwing out ideas at a breakneck pace, and quickly becoming convinced of their brilliance? I had just such a meeting one morning not too long ago. Everything moved really, really…