Understanding Mind, Society and Behavior Live Blog Understanding Mind, Behavior, and Society Date: Thursday, December 4, 2014Time: 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. ET (15:30 - 17:00 GMT or convert time)Location: World Bank HQ (JB1-080) & Online The underlying assumption for many economic policies is that human behavior arises from “rational “choice, with individuals carefully weighing their choices, considering all readily available information, and making decisions on their own. Tune in on Dec 4, 2014 at 10:30 (EST) as experts discuss the findings of the latest World Development Report 2015 and explore ways in which a richer understanding of the human factor and its behavior can improve policy design, implementation and evaluation. Follow the event via hashtag #WDRmind
There's a Word for That: 25 Expressions You Should Have in Your Vocabulary Recently I came across this amazing little Tumblr named ‘OtherWordly‘ – itself a play on words. It consists of a collection of strange and lovely words from different languages through different times. What I like most about this selection of consonants and vowels – little meaning-carrying packages of vibration – is that they all try to point to the unspeakable, the transient or the neglected. You can find my favourite words below – pick five that resonate most, write them down, yes seriously – go grab a pen -, make sure to learn them by heart, teach them to your inner voice and share them with others to guide our collective attention to what truly matters. 1 – Sophrosyne pronunciation | “so-frO-‘sU-nA Greek script | σωφροσύνη note | To everyone who is thinking “I want to get there” and also to everyone who is thinking “I’ll never get there”—you will. 2 – Vorfreude pronunciation | ‘for-froi-duh 3 – Numinous 4 – Nemophilist pronunciation | ne-‘mo-fe-list 5 – Sillage 6 – Erlebnisse 8 – Meliorism
Ceiling Height Can Affect How A Person Thinks, Feels And Acts -- ScienceDaily For years contractors, real estate agents and event planners have said that whether building, buying or planning an event, a higher or vaulted ceiling is always better. Are they right? Until now there has been no real evidence that ceiling height has any influence or advantage with consumers. But recent research by Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, suggests that the way people think and act is affected by ceiling height. Meyers-Levy and co-author Rui (Juliet) Zhu, assistant professor of marketing at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia and a Carlson doctoral alum, found that, depending on the situation, ceiling height will benefit or impair consumer responses. The paper “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing People Use,” will be published in the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.
Why Our Entire Generation Needs An Ass-Kicking, Pronto Anyone born between 1985-1995 needs an ass-kicking. As of this moment, there are EIGHTY million of these people in the USA. If I were using people I know as a sample study, SIXTY million of them would be on Netflix or stalking a random stranger’s Twitter. And what’s even worse, I’ll confess I spent this whole morning re-organizing my Pinterest boards. So why do people of The Greatest Generation look down upon us and claim that we’re the demise of all of their hard work? Don’t get me wrong. The seemingly obvious answer, if you ask any well-bred, semi-intelligent American, is something along the lines of, “It’s our responsibility to carry our country into the future and continue to be the greatest country in the world.” OF COURSE, I’m obsessed with the USA and would tattoo an American Flag on my ass to prove it, but you’re actually drunk right now if you think our generation made America the greatest country in the world. Is the Internet and technology to blame for our laziness?
8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance | Activism & Vision Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination. Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. How exactly has American society subdued young Americans? 1. Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination.
Strategies Quick Learners Use To Pick Up Anything Starred Up: The greatest prison drama since Scum? READ: The 10 best films from the London Film Festival 2013 This plotline comes directly from Asser’s own experiences. He worked at Feltham Young Offender Institution before running his self-styled “encounter groups” for violent inmates at Wandsworth Prison. To this day, he fervently believes that segregating these prisoners does nothing to resolve the problems of anyone involved. Encounter groups, however, “give us an opportunity to deal with these very violent guys, and give them a whole range of skills so they can go back on the same wing and live safely together. “That has to be better than separating them, which means a dispute festers and gets passed further down the line – to other prisons, when these guys meet up again, or back out in the community. Asser’s methods may be radical, but the current system doesn’t seem to be working. Asser, of course, believes in doing the opposite. Ray Winstone and Mick Ford in a scene from Scum, 1978 (Rex) LOOK: Sundance 2014 in pictures
Human Emotions Map Shows How the Mind Affects the Body We often say that when we are in love we feel warmth all over our body or when we are angry the blood rushes to our head. As it turns out, these are not just words. Researchers from Finland for the first time presented the evidence that emotions are associated with a series of physiological changes in our body, which in fact are the same in all people, regardless of race or culture. The study, published in the journal «Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences», presents the findings in form of diagrams. Yellow color shows the points with the most increased activity, while blue color indicates the ones with the more reduced activity. People in love have a feeling of warmth, which leaves ‘unaffected’ the area around the knees and down. Researchers from several Finnish universities led by Lauri Nummenmaa and Enrico Glerean showed movies and read stories, which were designed to induce specific emotions, to 700 male and female volunteers of various races and cultures.
Mass psychosis in the US Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux. Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Not just for psychotics anymore Cost benefit analysis Making patients worse
Lucid dreams and metacognition: Awareness of thinking; awareness of dreaming -- ScienceDaily To control one's dreams and to live 'out there' what is impossible in real life -- a truly tempting idea. Some persons -- so-called lucid dreamers -- can do this. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich have discovered that the brain area which enables self-reflection is larger in lucid dreamers. Thus, lucid dreamers are possibly also more self-reflecting when being awake. Lucid dreamers are aware of dreaming while dreaming. Sometimes, they can even play an active role in their dreams. Neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry have compared brain structures of frequent lucid dreamers and participants who never or only rarely have lucid dreams. The differences in volumes in the anterior prefrontal cortex between lucid dreamers and non-lucid dreamers suggest that lucid dreaming and metacognition are indeed closely connected.
Confronting Cognitive Dissonance Podcast: Play in new window | Download by James CorbettBoilingFrogsPost.com March 25, 2014 Have you or a loved one ever found yourself saying something like this? Or this? Or this? Then you might be suffering from cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance? The theory of cognitive dissonance was first posited by American social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1957 to explain the discomfort and mental stress that we feel when our beliefs, ideals or values don’t match up to reality. Festinger’s theory states that when people are in a state of dissonance, that is, when their beliefs or values don’t match up with their behaviour or experiences, they will adjust those beliefs or values, or even adjust their perception of reality, in order to achieve consonance. This theory helps us to understand how someone can both deny and admit the existence of a conspiracy in the very same breath. Indeed, 9/11 represents one of the greatest examples of cognitive dissonance in our own era.
Dark Matter Could Be Responsible for Asteroid Impacts on Earth The mysterious dark matter that fills the entire universe could make devastating asteroids and comets fall onto the Earth, causing mass extinctions, including the one of mankind. Americans physicists claim to have found evidence for the correctness of this theory in craters on the surface of the Earth. Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece from the University of Harvard, who made a related publication in the journal “Physical Review Letters“, believe that the threat is posed by a very dense disk of dark matter, located along the central plane of our galaxy and the thickness of which is about 35 light years. Our Sun, along with the Earth and the rest of the solar system, is continuously moving around the galactic center and at times crosses the disk of dark matter in its course. The two American physicists believe that this is the cause of the fact that our planet is occasionally bombarded by falls of catastrophic celestial bodies, which leave a greater or lesser imprint in the form of craters.
'Men want cuddles, kisses but women prefer sex' - Yahoo! Lifestyle London, July 11 (ANI): Researchers have found that acts of affection like hugs and kisses were more important to men than women. And for women, sex tends to get better over time - after a couple has been together about 15 years. Researchers surveyed over 1,000 couples from five different countries who had been in relationships for between one and 51 years. Men who reported frequent kissing and cuddling were three times as happy, on average, as those who had less snuggling with their wives or girlfriends. Women, meanwhile, said that such shows of affection had very little impact on their happiness. Both men and women reported their sex lives improving the longer their relationship had lasted. But men were more likely to say they were happy with their relationship while women were more likely to report being satisfied with the sex. The survey of couples from the US, Germany, Spain, Japan and Brazil was carried out by researchers from the Kinsey Institute at America's Indiana University.
Teaching Critical Thinking Whether or not you can teach something as subjective as critical thinking has been up for debate, but a fascinating new study shows that it’s actually quite possible. Experiments performed by Stanford's Department of Physics and Graduate School of Education demonstrate that students can be instructed to think more critically. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of critical-thinking skills in modern society. The ability to decipher information and interpret it, offering creative solutions, is in direct relation to our intellect.2 The study took two groups of students in an introductory physics laboratory course, with one group (known as the experimental group) given the instruction to use quantitative comparisons between datasets and the other group given no instruction (the control group). Comparing data in a scientific manner; that is, being able to measure one’s observations in a statistical or mathematical way, led to interesting results for the experimental group.