Roy F. Baumeister asks Is There Anything Good About Men? (Via HN.) He begins with this wonderfully interesting idea: biological differences result in a different payoff for risk-taking behavior. For men, taking risks, striving, fighting other men can payoff brilliantly in terms of reproductive success, but the same actions don’t help women much:
Why Parents Hate Parenting — New York Magazine is a great summary of the research findings that having kids makes people less happy. However, it teases out exactly what that means. For example, it’s the moment-to-moment happiness that people lose out on when they have kids. They have less freedom to do what they did before. “Small cracks” in their relationship with their spouse (which is integral to happiness) become “huge gulfs” under the pressure of children. What’s more, the later people wait in life, the more autonomy and enjoyment they have experienced from working and socializing, and therefore the more they give up when they do have children. My favorite part, however, was the idea that it isn’t so simple as moment to moment happiness… there’s a larger factor, one of purpose, to consider:
The Willpower Paradox: Scientific American says that asking yourself whether you will do something results in a more open mind that can accomplish more… getting you closer to your goal. Forcing yourself doesn’t work as well as asking of yourself:
How facts backfire - The Boston Globe, by Joe Keohane:
Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”
From a review of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl:
“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is,” Frankl writes. “After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”
One of the few truly selfish things you can do that doesn’t make you an asshole is to make yourself happy by making someone else happy.
… there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.
Wikipedia explains the Dunning–Kruger effect:
Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.
As soon as there’s someone who disagrees, or even just dithers or can’t decide, conformity is reduced. Some studies have found conformity can be reduced from highs of 97% on a visual judgement task down to only 36% when there is a competent dissenter in the ranks (Allen & Levine, 1971).
I always love these articles about “costly signaling” — the pursuit of real, not-fakable signals of your mating fitness. Take a look at Sex and shopping – it’s a guy thing - New Scientist (emphasis mine):
Rejection massively reduces IQ:
Aggression scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent.
“These are very big effects - the biggest I’ve got in 25 years of research,” says Baumeister. “This tells us a lot about human nature. People really seem designed to get along with others, and when you’re excluded, this has significant effects.”
I think I need to take this quote from a post here in May and print it out:
“What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
Sometimes, in the middle of the supermarket, I stop and look around at column after column of frozen food — any food I can imagine, right there for purchase. Think about that, anything I want to eat, I can. Instantly. Just hop in the heated/cooled automatic transportation machine. Sometimes, I can feel the pressure from the thousands of generations that preceded me — tens of thousands of years of suffering and hardship of our ancestors, attempting to find and grow enough food to live. And it makes me think, I’ve gotta do everything I can with this life. I have to act in such a way that honors the fact that I’ve never known hunger, that my life is unbelievably luxurious compared to 99.9% of those who came before me. I must push my potential, seize this moment, make the most of myself. And yet sometimes, I feel an unhappiness, a profound ennui. And it makes me sad, to feel that unworthy and unappreciative of this gift of ease. So, whenever I run across research about happiness, my interest is invariable piqued. In the parts of the world where the hunger problem has been solved, it has been replaced by a happiness problem — but, of course, the answer to unhappiness is much more complex than the answer to hunger.
Praise is effective when specific - Good, new, peer-reviewed research revealing that praise can be very damaging to your children. Studies suggest that specific praise that is neither overused nor undeserved is the key to doing your part to mold children’s self-esteem into a healthy balance.
While waiting for my ear appointment today … wait a second, I’ll digress for a minute. Dr. Wilson has been treating my ears since I was two years old. He has, over the years, pulled my tonsils, adenoids, put in ear tubes (none of which I remember), fixed the hole that would’t heal from the ear tubes, and monitored my ears since that hole opened back up. I hear the phrase “could you write down a 1-2% TPM perforation” at regular sixth month intervals. There has always been hope of this healing, and right now it looks like my left ear, holy for all this time, just may be on the mend. Fantastic news for someone (me) who has always wanted to pursue things like water skiing and diving, but has always been hindered by the requisite ear protection. Maybe I’m just making excuses for myself. Regardless. While I was waiting for this appointment, I read the Newsweek cover story on anorexia from the December 5th issue. The article itself was nothing earth-shattering: a lot of personal stories and a point to a paradigm shift in the diagnosis; parents are no longer being blamed as “causing” the illness.