Month: May 2010
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The Relationship Between Police and Crime
Does an increased police presence decrease crime? That’s the seemingly simple and obvious question that Mark Easton poses on his BBC blog before explaining the difficulty in attempting to discern if a greater number of police helps to reduce crime. To set the scene, Easton quotes from a Steven Levitt study (pdf) that attempted to…
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The Cognitive Impact of Evaluative ‘Grade’ Letters
Priming students with “evaluative letters” (i.e. letters used to grade papers, such as A and F) has a significant influence on their performance on cognitive tests. As you can imagine, primed with an A their performance on the cognitive tests improve, while those primed with an F displayed degraded performance. That’s what researchers found when…
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Faith in Probability
Following the publishing of his first book–Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives—David Eagleman is interviewed about religion and his beliefs, providing a refreshingly new and… empirical… take on religious faith, atheism and agnosticism. Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty – you find the atheist…
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Happy Citizens are Good Citizens
By fostering happiness in our cities, towns and villages we are simultaneously cultivating inhabitants that will give more blood, donate more to charity, and generally be better citizens. That’s the conclusion from a study looking at how happy people become better citizens as a result of being happy. Happier people trust others more, and importantly,…
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Prevention of Attainment Increases Desire, Decreases Attractiveness
Being prevented from obtaining something we desire simultaneously increases our desire for the item and decreases its eventual attractiveness. That’s the counterintuitive result from a study that shows the various surprising effects of “being jilted”. We show how being “jilted”–that is, being thwarted from obtaining a desired outcome–can concurrently increase desire to obtain the outcome,…