By Jonathan Schlefer (Harvard Review) Adam Smith suggested the invisible hand in an otherwise obscure passage in his Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. He mentioned it only once in the book, while he repeatedly noted situations where “natural liberty” does not work. Let banks charge much more than 5% interest, and they will lend to “prodigals and projectors,” precipitating bubbles and crashes. Let “people of the same trade” meet, and their conversation turns to “some contrivance to raise prices.” Let market competition continue to drive the division of labor, and it produces workers as “stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”
via There Is No Invisible Hand – Jonathan Schlefer – Harvard Business Review.
By Melissa Boteach (ThinkProgress) Ann Romney has tweeted, “All moms are entitled to choose their path.” But unfortunately for low-wage working moms and nearly half of private sector workers, the” choice” is either “go to work and send my sick kid to school” or “stay at home with my sick child and risk losing my job or needed income.” That’s a choice no parent should have to make. Does Mitt Romney agree?
Women are now half of all workers on U.S. payrolls and breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of all families. Their incomes are sorely needed to provide basic economic security for their families.
Yet the U.S. also faces high rates of work-family conflict with few laws to support working families. One of the biggest culprits is workers’ lack of paid sick days to care for themselves, an elderly parent, or a sick kid – an issue that has been largely absent in the election debates.
Forty percent of private sector workers and 80 percent of low-wage workers do not have a single, paid sick day to recover from a short-term illness or to provide care for their loved ones.
via Does Mitt Romney Support Paid Sick Days? | ThinkProgress.
(The Local) Scientists at Uppsala University have found that the widespread belief that women and children are saved first in maritime disasters is a myth, unless the men are threatened with physical violence like on the Titanic.
“It is expected that the crew should rescue passengers, but our results show that captains and crew are more likely to survive than passengers,” said Mikael Elinder at the Department of Economics, Uppsala University and at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) in a statement.
“We also found that women and children were more inclined to die than men.”
via ‘Women and children first’ a myth: study – The Local.
By Daisy Grewal (Scientific American) A 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance. A more recent study suggests that this cognitive impairment takes hold even when men simply anticipate interacting with a woman who they know very little about.
In one experiment, just telling a man he would be observed by a female was enough to hurt his psychological performance.
Sanne Nauts and her colleagues at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands ran two experiments using men and women university students as participants. They first collected a baseline measure of cognitive performance by having the students complete a Stroop test. Developed in 1935 by the psychologist John Ridley Stroop, the test is a common way of assessing our ability to process competing information.
Men who thought a woman was observing them ended up performing worse. This cognitive impairment occurred even though the men had not interacted with the female observer.
Women’s performance did not differ, regardless of whether they were expecting a man or woman to observe them. But men who had been told a woman would observe them ended up doing much worse on the second Stroop task. Thus, simply anticipating the opposite sex interaction was enough to interfere with men’s cognitive functioning.
via Why Interacting with a Woman Can Leave Men “Cognitively Impaired”: Scientific American.
By Frederick E. Allen (Forbes) Four university professors found that power breeds overconfidence, and overconfidence leads to bad decisions.
People who had been primed to think of themselves as more powerful had more confidence in their answers — and yet their answers were actually less accurate.
The fifth and final experiment the four conducted found that the tie between power and overconfidence “was eliminated when the powerful were made to feel incompetent.”
via Study Finds That Having Power Can Make You Stupid – Forbes.
(ScienceDaily) Research over the past few decades has shown that viewing physical violence in the media can increase aggression in adults and children. But a new study, co-authored by an Iowa State University psychology professor, has also found that onscreen relational aggression — including social exclusion, gossip and emotional bullying — may prime the brain for aggression.
Douglas Gentile, an associate professor of psychology at Iowa State, was one of four authors of the study “‘Frenemies, Fraitors, and Mean-em-aitors’: Priming effects of viewing physical and relational aggression in the media on women,” which was recently published by the journal Aggressive Behavior. The study of 250 college women showed that mean screens may also activate the neural networks that guide behavior.
“What this study shows is that relational aggression actually can cause a change in the way you think,” said Gentile, who runs the Media Research Lab at Iowa State.
“And that matters because of course, how you think can change your behavior.”
Sarah Coyne and David Nelson, both researchers in Brigham Young University’s School of Family Life; and Jennifer Ruh Linder, a professor of psychology at Linfield College (Ore.), were the study’s other authors.
via Nasty people in the media prime the brain for aggression.
By Scoutmaster (FreeRepublic.com) When Rush Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute” repeatedly over the course of four days, he constantly made specific allegations about what Fluke had said. Among the four days of comments, Limbaugh said Fluke was “a woman who is happily presenting herself as an immoral, baseless, no-purpose-to-her life woman.” Which is odd, because Fluke never spoke of her own life. Rush claimed Fluke had testified that “she’s having so much sex she can’t pay for it,” although Fluke never said she was having sex or using contraceptives. Limbaugh said things like:
What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.
None of the statements about her sex life that Limbaugh attributed to Fluke were true, because Fluke never spoke about her sex life or her use of contraceptives. But Limbaugh repeatedly called Fluke a “slut,” and a “prostitiute” based on her statements that he made up. Rush blew it. He made hours of specific demeaning (at least to conservatives) allegations about what Fluke said, and those allegations weren’t true. And he called her insults (at least to conservatives) based on the false statements he attributed to her.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), a public figure suing for defamation must prove that that the defendant/publisher had ‘actual malice,’ which means the defendant must have known that the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity.
Was Sandra Fluke a public figure? Simply appearing before Congress, or appearing in the public, isn’t enough to make one a public figure. If Sandra Fluke had been subpoenaed to appear before Congress and had been required to make her statements as testimony, she almost certainly would not have been a public figure. Fluke also wasn’t a standard public figure at the time she gave her presentation because she hadn’t earned that role by being ‘pervasively’ in the news. Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323, 345.
So . . . I’d love to hear some experts in the area of defamation of public figures weigh in, but my quick-and-dirty is that if Fluke were not a public figure, it’s clear that Limbaugh defamed her repeatedly.
via Will Sandra Fluke Sue Rush Limbaugh (Vanity).
[Note: the comments have much less pig grunting than previous threads on the topic and a very persuasive argument that if Fluke sues Limbaugh he is likely to lose. This is the best legal opinion I've read so far. --JS]
via Will Sandra Fluke Sue Rush Limbaugh (Vanity).
[Note: the comments have much less pig grunting than previous threads on the topic and a very persuasive argument that if Fluke sues Limbaugh he is likely to lose. This is the best legal opinion I've read so far. --JS]
By Janice Wood (Psych Central News) Emotion-sensing computer software that responds to students’ cognitive and emotional states, including frustration and boredom, has been developed by researchers at the University of Notre Dame, University of Memphis, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The new technology matches the interaction of human tutors. It not only offers tremendous learning possibilities for students, but also redefines human-computer interaction, according to University of Notre Dame assistant professor of psychology Sidney D’Mello. D’Mello also is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering.
Dubbed “AutoTutor” and “Affective AutoTutor,” the software can gauge a student’s level of knowledge by asking probing questions, analyzing the responses, then proactively identifying and correcting misconceptions. It also responds to the student’s own questions, gripes, and comments and even senses a student’s frustration or boredom through facial expressions and body posture. It then changes its strategies to help the student conquer those negative emotions, the researchers said.
via Tutoring Software, AutoTutor, Responds to Student’s Emotions | Psych Central News.
By Sharon Kyle (LA Progressive) I have this gnawing sense that with the exception of official national holidays, the only time our nation honors people with a special day or month is when they are members of an exploited group. I’m sure I’ll get some feedback on this and I welcome it. But Secretaries’ Day comes to mind.
(Norml) The enactment of statewide laws allowing for the limited use of cannabis therapeutically is associated with reduced instances of suicide, according to a discussion paper published in January by the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany.
Researchers at Montana State University, the University of Colorado, and San Diego State University assessed rates of suicide in the years before and after the passage of statewide medical marijuana laws.
Authors found, “The total suicide rate falls smoothly during the pre-legalization period in both MML (medical marijuana law) and non-MML states. However, beginning in year zero, the trends diverge: the suicide rate in MML states continues to fall, while the suicide rate in states that never legalized medical marijuana begins to climb gradually.”
They reported that this downward trend in suicides in states post-legalization was especially pronounced in males. “Our results suggest that the passage of a medical marijuana law is associated with an almost 5 percent reduction in the total suicide rate, an 11 percent reduction in the suicide rate of 20- through 29-year-old males, and a 9 percent reduction in the suicide rate of 30- through 39-year-old males,” they determined.
Authors theorized that the limited legalization of cannabis may “lead to an improvement in the psychological well-being of young adult males, an improvement that is reflected in fewer suicides.” They further speculated, “The strong association between alcohol consumption and suicide-related outcomes found by previous researchers raises the possibility that medical marijuana laws reduce the risk of suicide by decreasing alcohol consumption.”
They concluded: “Policymakers weighing the pros and cons of legalization should consider the possibility that medical marijuana laws may lead to fewer suicides among young adult males.”
Full text of the discussion paper, “High on Life: Medical Marijuana Laws and Suicide,” is available online at: http://ftp.iza.org/dp6280.pdf.
For more information, please contact Allen St. Pierre, NORML Executive Director, at (202) 583-5500 or Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director, at: paul@norml.org.
via Study: Passage Of Medical Marijuana Laws Correlated With Fewer Suicides.
