I.Q. Scores and Genetics

Much of the bigotry and discrimination directed at underclass people and minorities is based on the disillusioned thinking that ones ability to succeed in life is tied to the individual’s genetic make up. It is no secrete that I strongly believe in the structural disadvantages people from disadvantaged background experience and how that manifests itself [...]

Dialectical Bootstrapping

This is an interesting concept relating to the averaging effect of decision making and accuracy of outcome. Psychologists Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig from the University of Basel wanted to know if individuals could come up with better answers using a technique they designed and called “dialectical bootstrapping.” It is a method by which [...]

Go Ahead and Be Proud; Your Success Might Depend On It.

That is the lesson in psychology we get courtesy of a study conducted by David DeSteno and collaborators at Northeastern University and published in  Psychological Science.
Contrary to popular belief, the researchers found that pride not only leads individuals to take on leadership roles in teams, but also fosters admiration, as opposed to scorn, from teammates. [...]

The Other Kind of Stimulus

There is so much discussion about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that recently became law, otherwise known as the stimulus plan. Below is a graph describing the stimulus increase as a result of different kinds of innate activations. It turns out that the density of neural firing is maximal when we are surprised or [...]

How We Think Before We Speak

It is hard to believe that this is applicable to all of us. It turns out that it is. The complex organ that we carry in our skull is very much attuned to the process of thinking and analyzing information in real time during conversations or reading. In a a new report in Current Directions [...]

Counteractive Self-control Theory

In a study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Kristian Ove Myrseth and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago and Yaacov Trope of NYU describe that “the mind protects itself against succumbing to temptation for as long as it must, and it does this by devaluing what’s most [...]

Suicide and Anomie

Today, we heard the news about yet another billionaire committing suicide because of the recent economic down turn. Mr. Adolf Merckle apparently lost more than $500m by a wrongside bet on a Volkswagen stock. In a previous post ,we learned about the concept of anomie, which was articulated by Emile Durkheim, in relation of the [...]

Fatherlessness and The Mask of Masculinity

Here is a rude-awakening about a quite storm sweeping through our own backyards. The epidemic of fatherlessness, which is affecting this country more than any other industrialized nation (40% of children in the U.S. are fatherless) is profiled with a heart-breaking detail in a PBS program called “Raising Cain: Boys in Focus.”
Hosted by child psychologist [...]

On Being Happy

Happiness is the fruit of satisfaction, the result of a fulfillment of want/need and the attainment of meaning to life. There apparently are ways, supported by scientific research, to actively ensure that one is happy.  Recent studies are finding out “how things like money, attitude, culture, memory, health, altruism, and our day-to-day habits affect our well-being.” The [...]

Pain and Perception

An interesting study [Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner. The Sting of Intentional Pain. Psychological Science, 2008; 19 (12) ] is out on the perception of severity of pain. This study finds that “the experience of pain changes depending upon the psychological context in which people are harmed. Specifically, the meaning of a harm—whether it was [...]