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Social Behaviour

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You’re 16. You’re a Pedophile. You Don’t Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now? Adam was at his desk in the second-story bedroom of his family’s suburban home when he came across it. He had recently switched file-sharing programs to one that offered more content and faster browsing, and his downloading habit had increased in kind. There was now a constant stream of files whose names included acronyms such as PTHC, or pre-teen hardcore.

The boy in this video was fair-haired and looked to be about one and a half, his small, naked body tied up to restrict movement. A man’s torso entered the frame and the child began to scream. As he watched the scene unfold, Adam was transfixed, and then quickly revolted; he reached over and stopped the video. He moved over to his bed, a twin with a sturdy, wooden frame, and lay down on the crumpled blue and white cloud-print sheet. Seeing that toddler trussed up and in pain confirmed something he’d long suspected but now had to acknowledge. I spoke with experts and asked around online. “My name is Adam,” it read. Dr. So fucking awful. Small talk topics at dinner parties should be banned | WIRED UK. What is your relationship with God? What is something you fear in life? These may be great topics for conversations, but we rarely tackle such meaty topics at social gatherings.

Instead, our discussions usually centre around summer travel plans, the latest home repair horror story and, of course, the weather. This is a shame, because research has confirmed what most people know but don't practise: surface level small talk does not build relationships and it is not great for our happiness levels. The sad answer is that we actively seek the lowest common denominator. To better understand this problem of social co-ordination and what we can do about it, we arranged a dinner party. According to a 2010 study by social anthropologist Kate Fox, in Britain, more than nine in ten people admit to having talked about the weather in the last six hours. To help combat the problem of co-ordination, we added one simple variable to this dinner party - rules. 1) Show up between 7:30-8pm.

How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language. What defines who we are? Our habits? Our aesthetic tastes? Our memories? If pressed, I would answer that if there is any part of me that sits at my core, that is an essential part of who I am, then surely it must be my moral center, my deep-seated sense of right and wrong. And yet, like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I’m a slightly different person in each of my languages—more assertive in English, more relaxed in French, more sentimental in Czech. Is it possible that, along with these differences, my moral compass also points in somewhat different directions depending on the language I’m using at the time? Psychologists who study moral judgments have become very interested in this question. In a 2014 paper led by Albert Costa, volunteers were presented with a moral dilemma known as the “trolley problem”: imagine that a runaway trolley is careening toward a group of five people standing on the tracks, unable to move.

Parents have been spanking children for millennia. 50 years of scientific evi... For 20 years, developmental psychologist Elizabeth Gershoff has been chasing a question: Does spanking actually do a child any good? "As far [back] as we have written records, people have been hitting children," Gershoff tells me. Today, spanking — hitting a child on the buttocks with an open hand — is still incredibly common. A 2015 Pew survey found that 45 percent of parents in the United States have spanked.

Given this long history, is it possible that parents throughout millennia — many with the best of intentions — were doing the right thing? Gershoff is now even more confident in the answer: It is a resounding "no. " In a recently published meta analysis in the Journal of Family Psychology, Gershoff and University of Michigan professor Andrew Grogan-Kaylor sift through 75 studies, for a total data pool of nearly 161,000 children, and find "no evidence that spanking is associated with improved child behavior. " But Gershoff suspects spanking does lead to these detrimental outcomes.

‘I Have No Choice but to Keep Looking’ Takamatsu had retired from the Ground Self-Defense Force; he was supposed to begin working as a bus driver that June. Until then, he searched for Yuko every day from morning till evening. Beginning in June, he searched on weekends. On one of his first searches, he made his way by foot to the bank. He traveled carefully across a field of debris. Trains lay twisted on the hillside. Sometimes Takamatsu walked alongside the soldiers and listened as they spoke over walkie-talkies. A month after the tsunami, when the bank was cleaning its premises, someone found Yuko’s phone in the parking lot. Photo When Narita heard about what happened to the bank employees, all of them swept off the roof by the tsunami, he returned home, crying.

In April, six weeks after the tsunami, a body was found floating under debris in the waters off Tsukahama Beach, on the opposite side of the port, in Goburra Bay. The body of a second bank employee washed up in Onagawa, at Takenoura Beach, on Sept. 26, 2011. What I Said When My White Friend Asked for My Black Opinion on White Privilege. Yesterday, I was tagged in a post by an old high school friend, asking me and a few others a very public, direct question about white privilege and racism. I feel compelled to publish not only his query but also my response to it, as it may be a helpful discourse for more than just a handful of folks on Facebook.

Here’s his post: “To all of my black or mixed-race FB friends, I must profess a blissful ignorance of this “white privilege” which I’m apparently guilty of possessing. Not being able to fully put myself in the shoes of someone from a background/race/religion/gender/nationality/body type that differs from my own makes me part of the problem, according to what I’m now hearing.Despite my treating everyone with respect and humor my entire life (as far as I know), I’m somehow complicit in the misfortune of others.

Here’s my response: Hi Jason, First off, I hope you don’t mind that I’ve quoted your post and made it part of mine. There are two reasons for this: 1.) 1.) Chilcot: Why we cover our ears to the facts. Image copyright Getty Images Do people moderate their views when presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Not necessarily, writes Matthew Syed. We like to think that we apportion our beliefs to the evidence. After all, isn't this the hallmark of rationality? Or do we? Consider an experiment, where two groups were recruited.

These groups were then showed two dossiers. Image copyright iStock Now you might suppose that, confronted by this contradictory evidence, the two groups would have concluded that capital punishment is a complex subject with arguments on both sides. When asked about their attitudes afterwards, those in favour of capital punishment said they were impressed with the dossier citing evidence in line with their views. The opposite conclusions were drawn by those against capital punishment. What this (and dozens of other experiments) reveal is the way we filter new information when it challenges our strongly-held beliefs or judgements. Image copyright AP. Hillary Clinton’s Search Results Manipulated by SourceFed, Not Google. Google is manipulating Autocomplete search results to help improve Hillary Clinton’s online reputation. SourceFed told the Internet about it, so it must be true. They had screenshots, big words, and talked with their hands.

They sounded like an important thought leader you should trust. Well, I have screenshots and I’ve been getting paid to manipulate Google’s search results for years versus getting paid to make sensational videos on YouTube to sell ads based on view count. In a nutshell: SourceFed believes Google is manipulating search results in favor of Hillary Clinton, because “Hillary Clinton cri-” did not return “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” and “Hillary Clinton in-” did not return “Hillary Clinton indictment.” Let me share some interesting screenshots about Donald Trump that I found by searching for two of his most scandalous controversies as covered by The Atlantic.

Donald Trump was accused of rape by Ivana Trump during their divorce. You’re correct. How do I know? 3rd Edit: What Does a Lifetime of Leers Do to Us? When we talk about gendered trauma, we tend to point to moments of physical danger, harassment or assault. Those are critical to discuss, of course. But we can’t leave aside the snowball effect of all types of sexism over a lifetime. For me, it’s not one particular message or adolescent incident that bothers me; it’s the weight of years of multiple messages and multiple incidents.

It’s the knowledge that this will never be just one day, just one message, just one hateful person. It’s a chipping away of my sense of safety and my sense of self. I have a 5-year-old daughter now. I want to prepare her for the inevitable leers and slights without making her fearful. I can tell her what to do if a stranger approaches, teach her about pay inequity or warn her about sexual harassment. We are in a powerful cultural moment for feminism. It is a much better world for women today, which is precisely why now is the time we can and should talk about feminism’s unfinished work. A Gorilla Is Killed, And Our Parent-Shaming Culture Springs To Life : 13.7: C... Alesia Buttrey attends a Monday vigil for the gorilla Harambe, outside the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden. John Minchillo/AP hide caption toggle caption John Minchillo/AP Alesia Buttrey attends a Monday vigil for the gorilla Harambe, outside the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden.

John Minchillo/AP Worldwide reaction continues in the aftermath of last Saturday's tragic incident at the Cincinnati Zoo in which the 17-year-old western lowland gorilla Harambe was shot to death by zoo personnel. Events unfolded quickly after a 3-year-old boy remarked (according to witnesses) that he wanted to go into the gorilla habitat, then crawled through protective barriers and fell into that enclosure. Headlines or lead paragraphs from articles published in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia speak of "outrage" — but let's not miss the fact that it's also shaming behavior we're witnessing, largely aimed at the boy's mother.

"Shameful. Barbara J. Why humans run the world. 70,000 years ago humans were insignificant animals. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were unimportant. Their impact on the world was very small, less than that of jellyfish, woodpeckers or bumblebees. Today, however, humans control this planet. How did we reach from there to here? What was our secret of success, that turned us from insignificant apes minding their own business in a corner of Africa, into the rulers of the world? We often look for the difference between us and other animals on the individual level. The real difference between us and other animals is on the collective level.

Only Homo sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. Cooperation is not always nice, of course. Yet how come humans alone of all the animals are capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers, be it in order to play, to trade or to slaughter? This is something only humans can do. Featured image courtesy iStock. The Life and Death of Jisha. I REMEMBER HER SMILE. We had met a few times. She was very quiet, usually with a friend or two. We never talked. She studied in the same college where I pursued a mid-career course in Law. She was two years senior to me.

I also have a fading memory of her during an exam. She turned up like any other student trying to revise the entire syllabus at the last minute before entering the examination hall. Despite being in the same college for a year together, there were things I didn’t know about her. On the night of 28 April, she was found dead in her shack on the side of a canal in purambokku land (land owned by the government for which residents do not have a title). I read the double column news with her photograph on the local page of a newspaper on 30 April. Jisha’s body lying in a pool of blood was found by her mother, Rajeshwari. Jisha’s body lying in a pool of blood was found by her mother, Rajeshwari. “We were not in touch with them. She hugged and kissed me in tears.

Giving What We Can is Cause Neutral. Giving What We Can materials (including our website and presentations) typically talk about global poverty, even though as an organisation we are fundamentally cause neutral. Our recommended charities work in global health, while we have cause reports and ‘in-area’ recommendations for charities in poverty broadly construed (including, for example, climate change). That might seem to be a surprising choice, so in I’m going to write a couple of posts explaining why we do this. In this post, I’ll explore what cause neutrality is and say a bit about GWWC’s overall aims. The following post will be about how we see ourselves fitting into the EA ecosystem.

What does it mean to be cause neutral? A person is cause neutral if they choose who to help by how much they can help them, rather than with reference to their personal connections (whether with a person or an intervention). Although we often talk as if it were binary, cause neutrality is a matter of degree. Giving What We Can's stance. India's Secret Urban Poor: Twentysomethings Who Are Broke, Hungry, And Totall... On caring. I'm not very good at feeling the size of large numbers. Once you start tossing around numbers larger than 1000 (or maybe even 100), the numbers just seem "big". Consider Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

If you told me that Sirius is as big as a million earths, I would feel like that's a lot of Earths. If, instead, you told me that you could fit a billion Earths inside Sirius… I would still just feel like that's a lot of Earths. The feelings are almost identical. I feel a little respect for the bigness of numbers, if you pick really really large numbers. This phenomena is related to scope insensitivity, and it's important to me because I live in a world where sometimes the things I care about are really really numerous.

For example, billions of people live in squalor, with hundreds of millions of them deprived of basic needs and/or dying from disease. Knowing this, I care about every single individual on this planet. And this is a problem. Our care-o-meters are broken. The bare truth. Why are humans nearly hairless? AT THE back of a hairdresser's shop, just off Piccadilly in London, an Irish beautician called Genevieve is explaining what a “Brazilian” is as she practises her art on your correspondent. A Brazilian strip, some are surprised to learn, is nothing to do with Latin American football. Between each excruciating rip, she explains that she is going to remove nearly all my pubic hair, except for a narrow vertical strip of hairs the width of a couple of fingers. This is known colloquially as the “landing strip”. In only a few years, this form of waxing has gone from the esoteric to the everyday and is starting to rival the ordinary bikini wax in popularity.

At the same time the bikini wax is becoming a normal procedure for women of all ages: the youngest person Genevieve has waxed is a 12-year-old girl. Women are styling their pubic hair into hearts, stars and arrows. It is one of the more notable developments in hairdressing since the permanent wave. Great for scouring pots Cool, man. The True Purpose of Microsoft Solitaire, Minesweeper, and FreeCell. Photographer Captures Subjects After a Glass (or Two, or Three) of Wine. Teaching Men to Be Emotionally Honest. The problem with a technology revolution designed primarily for men. 7 Things To Say To Young Girls That Isn't About Them Being "Pretty"

Putting me in my place: Sexism, misogyny and trolls | #spuddings. The Useless Agony of Going Offline. How “Making a Murderer” Went Wrong. The tube at a standstill: why TfL stopped people walking up the escalators | UK news. An Unbelievable Story of Rape. The Economist. Should driverless cars kill their own passengers to save a pedestrian? What if I never get over him (or her) – you asked Google, here’s the answer | Annalisa Barbieri. Fake Cover Letters Expose Discrimination Against Disabled.

Diversity is for white people: The big lie behind a well-intended word. Why people under 35 are so unhappy. The philosophical problem of killing baby Hitler, explained. The Cold Logic of Drunk People. Working From Home Can Increase Employee Satisfaction, but It's Also Lonely. Police Killings of Blacks: Here Is What the Data Say. Why We Sleep Together. A typical week of school lunch for kids in Paris vs. New York.