Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Fifty years ago, Zajonc, Heingartner, and Herman (1969) conducted a famous experiment on social enhancement and inhibition of performance in cockroaches; no evidence of a social-facilitation effect

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Replicating Roaches: A Preregistered Direct Replication of Zajonc, Heingartner, and Herman’s (1969) Social-Facilitation Study. Emma Halfmann...

Christians’ self‐ratings are consistently lower than what they perceive to be the moral values of other Christians, due to comparison to Christian exemplars (religious leaders), not from a sense of humility

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Diverging Perceptions of Personal Moral Values and the Values of One's Religious Group. Travis Daryl Clark  Richard C. Grove  Heather K....

Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they're racist: A growing number of women are paying to confront their privilege – and racism – at dinners that cost $2,500

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Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they're racist.  Poppy Noor. The Guardian, Feb 3 2020. https://www....

Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants at 17 different sites in the next five years

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Japan Races to Build New Coal-Burning Power Plants, Despite the Climate Risks. Hiroko Tabuchi. The New York Times, Feb. 3, 2020. https://www...

Written erotica 2000-2016: As in video, found no meaningful increase in either the amount of content with violence, family (incest), or BDSM themes or popularity of any of the three transgressive themes within the erotic narratives

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Change in the Popularity of Transgressive Content in Written Erotica between 2000 and 2016. Martin Seehuus, Ariel B. Handy & Amelia M. S...

Most interestingly, vegetarian eaters’ approach bias towards non-vegetarian food pictures also did not differ from that of the omnivorous group, despite vegetarians rating those pictures as much less pleasant

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Fearing the wurst: Robust approach bias towards non-vegetarian food images in a sample of young female vegetarian eaters. Helen C. Knight, S...

Hyper-realistic Face Masks in a Live Passport-Checking Task: The masks went undetected during live identity checks in large numbers

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Hyper-realistic Face Masks in a Live Passport-Checking Task. David J. Robertson. Perception, February 3, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/03010...

They formulate a plausible evolutionary function, the sexual exploitation hypothesis: Psychopathy exhibits “special design” features for subverting female mate choice, facilitating the induction of favorable impressions & sexual desire

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Psychopathy and the Induction of Desire: Formulating and Testing an Evolutionary Hypothesis. Kristopher J. Brazil & Adelle E. Forth. Evo...

Inequality aversion and altruistic concerns play an important role for redistributive voting that is particularly pronounced for above-median income earners

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Other-regarding Preferences and Redistributive Politics. Thomas Epper, Ernst Fehr and Julien Senn (2020), Working paper series / Department ...

Sentencers prefer certain numbers when meting out sentence lengths (in custody and community service) and amounts (for fines/compensation)

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Criminal Sentencing by Preferred Numbers. Mandeep K. Dhami et al. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, February 3 2020. https://doi.org/10.11...

Physically attractive faces attract us physically; effect is greater with males

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Physically attractive faces attract us physically. Robin S.S. Kramer et al. Cognition, Volume 198, May 2020, 104193. https://doi.org/10.1016...

How Firm Are the Foundations of Mind-Set Theory? The Claims Appear Stronger Than the Evidence

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How Firm Are the Foundations of Mind-Set Theory? The Claims Appear Stronger Than the Evidence. Alexander P. Burgoyne, David Z. Hambrick, Bro...
Monday, February 3, 2020

Echo Chambers Exist! (But They're Full of Opposing Views)

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Echo Chambers Exist! (But They're Full of Opposing Views). Jonathan Bright, Nahema Marchal, Bharath Ganesh, Stevan Rudinac. arXiv Jan 30...

Mating with immature females is an alternative tactic for brown widow males, since adult females cannibalize mating males & immature females do not; but males approached and preferred to mate with adult females

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Alternative mating tactics in a cannibalistic widow spider: do males prefer the safer option? Lenka Sentenská, Gabriele Uhl, Yael Lubin. An...

Comparing learning to normative benchmarks reveals that people overreact to signals about goods that they own, but that learning is close to Bayesian for non-owned goods

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Ownership, Learning, and Beliefs. Samuel M. Hartzmark Samuel Hirshmany Alex Imasz. November 2019. https://fraconference.com/wp-content/uploa...

American atheists are relatively liberal and likely to experience political conflict and follow political news; agnostics are particularly likely to vote and feel politically isolated from their families

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The Politics of Religious Nones. Philip Schwadel. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, February 2 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/jss...

Exposure to half-dressed women and economic behavior: Men take more risk, no effect on willingness to compete & math performance; very little effect on economic decision making

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Exposure to half-dressed women and economic behavior. Evelina Bonnier et al. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 168, De...

A sales tax is better at promoting healthy diets than the fat tax (a tax on "unhealthy" food) and the thin subsidy (a subsidy on "healthy" food)

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A sales tax is better at promoting healthy diets than the fat tax and the thin subsidy. Zarko Kalamov. Health Economics, 2020;1–14, DOI: 10....
Sunday, February 2, 2020

Liberian experiment: After one academic year, students in outsourced schools scored 0.18 σ higher in English and mathematics

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Outsourcing Education: Experimental Evidence from Liberia. Mauricio Romero, Justin Sandefur, and Wayne Aaron Sandholtz. American Economic Re...

Unwantedness across birth order explains a substantial part of the documented birth order effects in education & employment; we find no birth order effects in families who have more control over their fertility

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Birth order and unwanted fertility. Wanchuan Lin, Juan Pantano, Shuqiao Sun. Journal of Population Economics, April 2020, Volume 33, Issue 2...

The growth of behavioural complexity as well as the ex-vivo accumulation of human behaviour (non-genetically inherited behaviourome), cannot be explained by genetic/epigenetic mechanisms of inheritance

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Mechanisms of a near-orthogonal ultra-fast evolution of human behaviour as a source of culture development. Christian P. Müller. Behavioural...