Month: October 2011
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Infants Quickly Learn to Ignore Unreliable and Silly People
Children learn a lot from imitating the actions of adults, with recent research suggesting that infants as young as 14 months are selective imitators — taking cues from our behaviour in order to decide which of us adults to learn from and which to ignore. In a study where researchers expressed delight before either presenting an…
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Ebert’s Glossary of Movie Terms
If there’s one person I can think of who is qualified to produce a movie glossary, it has to be Roger Ebert. And you know what? He did, it was published, and I had no idea until just now. Inspiring frequent light giggles and the occasional guffaw, Ebert’s glossary appears to have originated as an…
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The Minds of Dogs and How Pointing Evolved
Recent research suggests that domestic dogs seem capable of displaying a rudimentary “theory of mind” — a very human characteristic whereby you are able to attribute mental states to others that do not necessarily coincide with your own (in a nutshell). Stray domestic dogs, meanwhile, do not display this trait, suggesting that such mental attributes…
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The History (and Future) of the Universe
Starting at 10-25 seconds after the start of the universe (inflation) and ending 1015 years later (with the ultimate fate of the universe), the timeline of the universe is an incomprehensibly long and fascinating one. To help understand the forces that led to life as we know it and to get an idea of what’s…
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Optimal Caffeine Consumption
Whether caffeine serves any purpose other than removing withdrawal symptoms is a topic of study with conflicting results, but if you’re an optimist as well as a fan of caffeine in any of it’s many forms you’re most likely consuming it sub-optimally. Why not improve your caffeine knowledge and learning about the optimal way of…
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When Uncertainty Increases Persuasiveness
Common wisdom would suggest that the more certain a person is on a subject, the more persuasive and credible we perceive them to be. However a study looking looking at how certainty affects persuasiveness and perceived credibility found that the opposite is true: Experts are more persuasive when they seem tentative about their conclusions […]…
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First Offers and Aggressive Offers: Optimal Negotiating Tactics
When negotiating ensure that you make the first offer and make sure it’s an aggressive one: this is almost always the optimal negotiation strategy. That’s the conclusion from a study looking at negotiation tactics and the anchoring effect (from the same researchers that discovered the optimal starting prices for negotiations and auctions). One of the…
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Labelling Homeopathic Products
Earlier this year the UK’s MHRA opened a consultation to help them decide how homeopathic products should be labelled when sold to the public. As expected, Ben Goldacre — devoted critic of homeopathy, pseudoscience and general quackery — suggested a label of his own and asked his readers for further suggestions. Some of the suggestions…