Dr Ciarán Mc Mahon
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"Social"
No man is an island, as John Donne quoth, and to be isolated as such must be a horrible experience. The following quote is from a short and harrowing piece from a recent guest of the Islamic Republic of Iran:
More than once, I beat at the walls until my knuckles [...]
This is a brilliant piece from social anthropologist Kate Fox. Her basic point is that the characterisation of the effects of alcohol by many awareness campaigns does not stand up to scientific scrutiny, and could probably increase its attraction. It’s very simple, she says:
The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and [...]
Interesting piece about how the justice system does not parse well with psychological science:
Research has shown that people frequently make mistakes when crunching probabilities in their heads. “We like a good story to explain the evidence and this makes us use statistics inappropriately,” he says. When Sally Clark was convicted in 1999 of smothering her two children, [...]
Very interesting points – we are really very poor at understanding our own decision-making.
In his forthcoming book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” I’ll write more about it in a couple of weeks, Kahneman calls this the planning fallacy. Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future. That’s fine. Optimistic [...]
Interesting studies explained over on Psychology Today. Here’s the skinny:
When our control in one area is restricted, we look for another outlet. That means that it is worth spending some time thinking about the areas of your life in which you can exert some control. Perhaps you have a creative outlet in which you feel [...]
This is quite good, though the experiments seem a little odd.
Because each of us is a perpetual work in progress, we live our lives with one eye on the future. In that future we see ourselves transformed into our true, ideal self – just as we would like to be.
http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/07/why-our-ideal-self-seems-further-away.php
There are plenty of studies demonstrating similar effects to this, even if the ‘social neuroscience’ tag leaves me instantly suspicious!
“Emotional information presented concurrently with touch may be more motivating such that more processing resources are allocated to them than to emotional information presented without touch,”
Interesting post by David DiSalvo:
If that sounds hyperbolic to you, consider a few of the variables that influence human decision-making to the detriment of what we call “justice.”
via Why Juries Will Be Replaced by Computers – David DiSalvo – Neuropsyched – Forbes.
Five key principles of online conversations
via A 5-minute framework for fostering better conversations in comments sections | Poynter..
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