Toddlers smarter than apes? Attractive girly-men? News from around the web

There were so many fascinating news stories from around the web this weekend that I couldn't pick just one to tell you about this morning. Here's a sampler:

• Study finds humans better at social skills than apes. Why is this news? Because the humans in question were just two and a half years old. The toddlers were picked because they were at about the same cognitive level as the apes they were being compared with. Yet the humans did better at social tasks such as learning by imitation. The researchers argue this pokes a hole in the idea that there's such a thing as "general intelligence."
• Bolles reviews Pinker. Edmund Blair Bolles is just beginning a multi-part review of Steven Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought. Bolles says Pinker's thesis is that language acquisition is the opposite of the Whorfian hypothesis: Thought drives language, not the other way around.

More news below.

• Hairdressers make more tips when they compliment customers. Ever wonder why your hairstylist always says you look terrific, when in fact you generally look awful by the time you manage to get a cut? They've learned that this is likely to gain them a bigger tip. Now it's backed up by scientific data, and PsyBlog has the scoop.
• SAT tests predict future career success. Really? This seems a rather bold conclusion to make. Apparently researchers have been following thousands of students for 25 years after they took the SAT test. The students who were top scorers at age 13 had written dozens of books and acquired hundreds of patents, so maybe they've got something. Potentially more interesting is the fact that scores on the test reliably predicted career choices: people with higher math scores went into math-oriented careers, and people with high verbal scores went into humanities-oriented careers.
• Are psychologists taking the wrong approach in studying attractiveness? Inspired by the recent CogDaily post about facial attractiveness, Gene Expression's Agnostic wonders whether scientists could do better using a different methodology to study attractiveness. "But there are good reasons to believe that there are non-trivial statistical interactions between facial features, so that isolating one and varying it misses the point: whether girly eyes are attractive depends on what the rest of the face looks like. It's just hard to judge the attractiveness of facial features out of context since facial perception is a pretty gestalt process." In other words, by systematically changing single facial features, psychologists may be missing the forest for the trees. Agnostic offers a rather compelling case that this may be why scientists haven't yet been able to explain the female attraction to "girly" male faces.

Still haven't had enough news? Visit Encephalon 31 over at Dr. Deb's place.