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Who Am I? Why Everything You Know about Your “Self” Is Wrong

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Psychology Today - May. 09 (Opinion) -

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The nudge unit – has it worked so far?

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - May. 02 (Opinion) - Since 2010 David Cameron's pet project has been tasked with finding ways to improve society's behaviour – and now the 'nudge unit' is going into business by itself. But have its initiatives really worked? When the day comes to write the obituary of this curious coalition, a day that many feel can't come too soon, it won't be "the big society" that it is remembered for creating. It seems unlikely to be "fairness" either. There may, however, be a large section on "the nudge unit", otherwise known as the cabinet office's behavioural insights team . Set up in the summer of 2010 shortly after this government came to office, and well known to be a pet project of David Cameron's, it is essentially a little band of academics looking for ways to run the country better. (There used to be nine of them, but there are now 13, mostly economists and psychologists.) In part, the unit owes its reputation to Cameron, and to its nickname, a reference to the 2008 book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, ...

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What a Conspiracy Theorist Believes

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - Apr. 10 (Opinion) - New Yorker (blog)What a Conspiracy Theorist BelievesNew Yorker (blog)One could be a conspiracy theorist about Coca-Cola without having any particular views about climate change, or vice versa. And indeed, some subjects really did believe in climate change even as they doubted the intentions of the sugar-water company ...and more »

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My doctor doesn't think I'm going to die today

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Kos - By JohnnyRook - Mar. 27 (Opinion) - news can depress. At times it depresses me but, more than anything else, it has filled my life with meaning. I have a mission. Before I die, I want to have some sense that this beautiful planet that has provided the context for my life, will have some chance of enduring. I want to die with hope, believing that my teenage son and his children and your children and their children will live in a world that is reasonably hospitable to human beings. I don't know how that can happen if people will not face the reality of what is taking place in the world. So, I continue to sound the alarm, even though I know that most of what I write is discounted as alarmist or simply ignored as too uncomfortable to deal with.

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Wake Up! Our World Is Dying and We're All in Denial

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Mary Pipher - Oct. 21 (Opinion) - After years of being a therapist and a mother, I've learned that shouting "wake up" doesn't work. One of my most dispiriting realizations was that while I wanted desperately to preserve the world I loved, I didn't even know how to share this fact with my closest friends.

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Ann Romney: Biggest Fear Is For Mitt's 'Mental Well-Being'

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Sep. 29 (News Report) - Ann Romney told a Nevada television station her biggest concern if her husband, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, becomes president was his "mental well-being."

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Army Seeks To Curb Rising Tide Of Suicides

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

All Things Considered - By Larry Abramson - Sep. 27 (Special Report) - At Fort Myer, Va., a small Army base across the river from Washington, D.C., Chaplain Mark Worrell is talking to about 100 soldiers, reciting the grim numbers. "This year, 2012, there have been more suicides in the Army than combat deaths," he says.

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Hedge Fund Hype, Wall Street Horoscopes, and Drop-Top Jets: The Magical Minds of the “Radical Rich”

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

nationofchange.org - By Richard (RJ) Eskow - Sep. 27 (News Analysis) - This isn't an episode of the X-Files. These seemingly unrelated stories are part of a larger pattern. What appears to be a sudden epidemic of magical thinking actually reflects something else: the rise of a financial sector whose economic incentives have tilted away from core business competencies - and toward something like that looks a little more like madness.

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What Mitt Romney’s Body Language Is Trying to Tell Us

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Leslie Savan - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - My pop-psych take is that—with some notable exceptions (like grabbing Perry, or tackling a fellow student at prep school to cut off his hair off)—Mitt finds it far safer to express the passive side of his passive-aggressiveness: arms immobile at his sides (the better to not throttle you with); mouth closed (the better to not blurt insults); eyes dreamy (the better to not shoot daggers). It all goes with how he trained himself, consciously or otherwise, to not be as honest as his dad.

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Why Is Everyone on the Internet So Angry?

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries - Jul. 25 (Opinion) - With a presidential campaign, health care and the gun control debate in the news these days, one can't help getting sucked into the flame wars that are Internet comment threads. But psychologists say this addictive form of vitriolic back and forth should be avoided -- or simply censored by online media outlets -- because it actually damages society and mental health.

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Children, brain development and the criminal law

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceDaily - Jun. 18 (News Report) - The legal system needs to take greater account of new discoveries in neuroscience that show how a difficult childhood can affect the development of a young person's brain which can increase the risk adolescent crimes, according to researchers.

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Why Smart People Are Stupid

Sat, 16 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jonah Lehrer - Jun. 16 (Special Report) - In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? When people face an uncertain situation, they don’

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Why the Truth Still Matters

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - Let’s face it, voters love to hear falsehoods. Mitt Romney proclaims that President Obama’s health care law is a “federal takeover of the U.S. health care system,” and his supporters approve. Obama’s people nodded in agreement when the president said “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” But both claims are false. The truth about Romney’s claim is that the federal government accounted for 43.6 percent of all U.S. health care spending in 2009, before the law was signed, and government actuaries predict that in 2015, when the law is fully effective, that will rise to 47.4 percent. What’s more, much or most of that 3.8 percentage point increase would have happened anyway as the postwar baby boom generation reaches age 65 and goes on Medicare. So the law is no “takeover.” Rather, it’s a modest, incremental change in the existing system.

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Military Suicide Epidemic: More US Soldiers Have Killed Themselves Than Died on Battlefield in 2012

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman - Jun. 13 (News Report) - More U.S. soldiers have died this year by taking their own lives than on the battlefield. The Pentagon says there have been at least 154 suicides among active-duty troops in 2012, a rate of nearly one each day. We're joined by three guests: Kevin Hines, who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and now counsels suicidal soldiers; Bonnie Carroll, co-chair of the Pentagon's Task Force on the Prevention of Suicide in the Armed Forces and president of the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors; and journalist Aaron Glantz, author of the book "The War Comes Home: Washington's Battle Against America's Veterans." [Transcript to come. Check back soon.]

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Madness of Late-Stage Capitalism

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Consortium News - By Phil Rockstroh - Jun. 11 (Opinion) - Late-stage capitalism has similarities to an aging billionaire terrified of microscopic germs – imagine Howard Hughes at the end of his days – trying to extend life by frenetically worrying about invisible dangers, writes Phil Rockstroh in this reflection on his father’s death.

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America: Where It's Easier to Get a Gun Than Good Mental Health Care

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Valerie Tarico - Jun. 11 (Opinion) - When someone kills – we ask why? It’s a worthy question. A part of the answer that haunts me (because it seems so preventable) is the way we choose as a society to prioritize our resources. We build for-profit prisons across the country, with lock-up room for minor drug offenders. But while prisons are growing, prevention and treatment services are disappearing.

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Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Pew Research Center - Jun. 10 (Special Report) - As Americans head to the polls this November, their values and basic beliefs are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years. Unlike in 1987, when this series of surveys began, the values gap between Republicans and Democrats is now greater than gender, age, race or class divides. Overall, there has been much more stability than change across the 48 political values measures that the Pew Research Center has tracked since 1987. But the average partisan gap has nearly doubled over this 25-year period – from 10 percentage points in 1987 to 18 percentage points in the new study.

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What's Different About The Brains Of People With Autism?

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By Jon Hamilton - Jun. 10 (Research) - There's growing evidence that the difference involves the fibers that carry information from one part of the brain to another. Brain scans of people with autism show a lack of synchrony between different areas of the brain.

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Psychology Of Fraud: Why Good People Do Bad Things

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

NPR - By CHANA JOFFE-WALT, ALIX SPIEGEL, Adam Cole, Maria Godoy, Anne Gudenkauf - Jun. 02 (Special Report) - Enron, Worldcom, Bernie Madoff, the subprime mortgage crisis. Over the past decade or so, news stories about unethical behavior have been a regular feature on TV, a long, discouraging parade of misdeeds marching across our screens. And in the face of these scandals, psychologists and economists have been slowly reworking how they think about the cause of unethical behavior. In general, when we think about bad behavior, we think about it being tied to character: Bad people do bad things. But that model, researchers say, is profoundly inadequate. Which brings us to the story of Toby Groves.

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6 Absurdly Demeaning Conservative Attacks on Women

Mon, 28 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Soraya Chemaly - May. 28 (News Analysis) - .right-wing politicians and legislators obviously favor pigs, cows and livestock in their "women are not quite human" metaphors and analogies. What does this tell us about how conservatives like their womenfolk?

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The President's Last Line of Defense

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

National Journal - By Ronald Brownstein - May. 26 (News Analysis) - The new round of national and state surveys this week generally showing President Obama clinging to a tenuous advantage over Republican Mitt Romney reinforce the conclusion that socially liberal, upscale white women may stand as the president's indispensable line of defense in his struggle for reelection. Both the national ABC/Washington Post survey released earlier this week, and the NBC/Marist Polls released Thursday in the battleground states of Ohio, Virginia and Florida show Obama retaining preponderant support among minority voters who were critical to his 2008 victory. Conversely, in almost all of the surveys, Obama faces a consistent pattern of erosion from his already meager 2008 levels of support among whites without a college education.

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Andy Carvin on Twitter as a newsroom and being human

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Mathew Ingram - May. 26 (Interview) - In a discussion about his use of Twitter as a reporting tool, NPR strategist Andy Carvin made some interesting points about the value of crowdsourced journalism -- including the importance of being transparent about the process, and the virtues of being human.

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Why you vote the way you do

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Week - By Jonathan Haidt - May. 25 (Opinion) - Here's a simple definition of ideology: "a set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved." And here's the most basic of all ideological questions: Should we preserve the present order or change it? Political theorists long assumed that people chose ideologies to further their self-interest. The rich and powerful want to preserve and conserve; the workers want to change things. But that link has been largely broken in modern times, when the rich go both ways (industrialists mostly right, tech billionaires mostly left), and so do the poor (rural poor mostly right, urban poor mostly left). So for most of the late 20th century, political scientists embraced blank-slate theories in which people soaked up the ideology of their parents.

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After Facebook fails

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Harvard Blogs - By Doc Searls - May. 24 (Opinion) - At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 90

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How Crazy Is Wall Street, New York Times?

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Daily Beast - By Edward Jay Epstein - May. 20 (Opinion) - The New York Times published an opinion piece on May 12, 2012, concerning the question of whether the rich, from a moral standpoint, are good or bad. The story reported, “A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are ‘clinical psychopaths’ and that they exhibit an ‘unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.’ ” The vivid term “clinical psychopath” brings to mind the berserk buzz-saw-wielding investment banker played by Christian Bale in the film American Psycho. Since some 3.9 million people work in the financial-services industry, a clinically diagnosed horde of lunatics numbering almost 400,000 people would certainly be a matter of public concern, though it might only confirm some journalists’ view of American capitalism.

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