Engaging Ideas

What Is Consciousness?

2010-09-04T15:29:12Z

Not Telling Them Straight

2010-08-26T19:02:56Z

Chilean officials dropping wait-time news gently to 33 trapped miners - CNN.com

As Chile labors carefully to rescue 33 trapped miners, the nation is subtly working to buoy their hopes and psychological equilibrium by not telling them straight out just how long it could take to free them from the bottom of a dark and craggy shaft...

Authorities believe it would be too much of a psychological blow to tell the miners that experts estimate it could take three to four months to drill the men out.

Wipeout

2010-08-26T00:00:07Z

Capitalism Has Made Society Kinder

2010-08-21T21:11:43Z

Capitalism has made society 'kinder'~ National Post

Social scientists -- and economists in particular -- have long been baffled with the way people in large societies are so trusting and fair in dealings with strangers. Many academics have argued it is a throwback to a time when humans were hunter-gatherers.

Mr. Henrich and his colleagues say their findings indicate playing fair with strangers is a behaviour that was favoured as the size of societies and populations grew.

The emergence and growth of markets allowed for the exchange of goods, skills and knowledge and enabled large complex societies to emerge and function, Mr. Henrich says, noting that humans in large societies are not nearly as selfish as some would suggest.

Ewwwwwwwww!

2010-08-16T21:40:14Z

Ewwwwwwwww! - The Boston Globe

Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn't return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

Today, psychologists and philosophers are piecing these findings together into a theory of disgust's moral role and the evolutionary forces that determined it: Just as our teeth and tongue first evolved to process food, then were enlisted for complex communication, disgust first arose as an emotional response to ensure that our ancestors steered clear of rancid meat and contagion. But over time, that response was co-opted by the social brain to help police the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Today, some psychologists argue, we recoil at the wrong just as we do at the rancid, and when someone says that a politician's chronic dishonesty makes her sick, she is feeling the same revulsion she might get from a brimming plate of cockroaches.

Digital Cheating

2010-08-09T17:20:03Z

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age ~ Trip Gabriel

The New York Times - Aug. 1st 2010

In this article, Trip Gabriel explores the problem of plagiarism in the digital age. Not only is plagiarism easier for students to commit online, but Gabriel shows that the idea of authorship is becoming more obscure as today's students view text as information for anyone to take. Are students legitimately out of touch with the concept of authorship and intellectual property, or are they just lazy and unprepared for college?

Spend Less and Find Happiness

2010-08-09T14:13:48Z

Consumers Find Ways to Spend Less and Find Happiness - NYTimes.com

Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.

Her mother called her crazy.

Philosophy and Faith

2010-08-02T13:45:47Z

Philosophy and Faith - NYTimes.com

At this point, the class perks up again as I lay out versions of the famous arguments for the existence of God, and my students begin to think that they're about to get what their parents have paid for at a great Catholic university: some rigorous intellectual support for their faith.

Soon enough, however, things again fall apart, since our best efforts to construct arguments along the traditional lines face successive difficulties. The students realize that I'm not going to be able to give them a convincing proof, and I let them in on the dirty secret: philosophers have never been able to find arguments that settle the question of God's existence or any of the other "big questions" we've been discussing for 2500 years.

Courage and Honesty

2010-08-02T01:49:34Z

Bertrand Russell Quotes

"None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear."

Bertrand Russell

Technology Holdouts

2010-08-01T20:05:42Z

Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Every semester a lot of professors' lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods.

hat frustrates Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University, who argues that clinging to outdated teaching practices amounts to educational malpractice.

If you were going to see a doctor and the doctor said, 'I've been really busy since I got out of medical school, and so I'm going to treat you with the techniques I learned back then,' you'd be rightly incensed," he told me recently. "Yet there are a lot of faculty who say with a straight face, 'I don't need to change my teaching,' as if nothing has been learned about teaching since they had been prepared to do it--if they've ever been prepared to."

How Money Restricts Life's Pleasures

2010-07-31T19:47:33Z

How Money Restricts Life's Pleasures -- PsyBlog

It's a mystery why money doesn't make us happy, because it feels like it damn well should. With money we can buy whatever we want, go wherever we want, even be whoever we want. Surely that should make us happy?

And yet study after study shows that in affluent societies money might bring satisfaction, but it doesn't bring much happiness.

Perhaps, as people become really rich, they don't choose more enjoyable activities (i.e. they stay in the office working)? Perhaps material goods just can't make us happy? Or perhaps there is always someone richer, spoiling the party with their more impressive wealth?

The New Science of Morality

2010-07-31T19:41:37Z

THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY ~Edge.org

Scientists engaged in the scientific study of human nature are gaining sway over the scientists and others in disciplines that rely on studying social actions and human cultures independent from their biological foundation.

No where is this more apparent than in the field of moral psychology. Using babies, psychopaths, chimpanzees, fMRI scanners, web surveys, agent-based modeling, and ultimatum games, moral psychology has become a major convergence zone for research in the behavioral sciences.

So what do we have to say? Are we moving toward consensus on some points? What are the most pressing questions for the next five years? And what do we have to offer a world in which so many global and national crises are caused or exacerbated by moral failures and moral conflicts? It seems like everyone is studying morality these days, reaching findings that complement each other more often than they clash.

The Busy vs. Lazy Paradox

2010-07-25T13:31:04Z

We're happier when busy but our instinct is for idleness ~ BPS Research Digest

Forced to wait for fifteen minutes at the airport luggage carousel leaves many of us miserable and irritated. Yet if we'd spent the same waiting time walking to the carousel we'd be far happier. That's according to Christopher Hsee and colleagues, who say we're happier when busy but that unfortunately our instinct is for idleness. Unless we have a reason for being active we choose to do nothing - an evolutionary vestige that ensures we conserve energy.

The World's Happiest Countries

2010-07-24T01:00:04Z

The World's Happiest Countries - Forbes.com

uantifying happiness isn't an easy task. Researchers at the Gallup World Poll went about it by surveying thousands of respondents in 155 countries, between 2005 and 2009, in order to measure two types of well-being.

First they asked subjects to reflect on their overall satisfaction with their lives, and ranked their answers using a "life evaluation" score between 1 and 10. Then they asked questions about how each subject had felt the previous day. Those answers allowed researchers to score their "daily experiences"--things like whether they felt well-rested, respected, free of pain and intellectually engaged.

Subjects that reported high scores were considered "thriving." The percentage of thriving individuals in each country determined our rankings

Why Money Makes You Unhappy

2010-07-23T17:26:25Z

Why Money Makes You Unhappy | Wired Science | Wired.com

Money is surprisingly bad at making us happy. Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries.

Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history - 21st century America - is slowly getting less pleased with life... Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure....

But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn't money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. The scientists explore the "experience-stretching hypothesis," an idea first proposed by Daniel Gilbert.