This is the essence of learning. The lecturer says something, and it goes in one ear and out the other. The factoid is repeated; same thing. It’s repeated enough times and—aha!—the lightbulb goes on a...
This was based on studies of a rare disorder, congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). An enzyme in the adrenal glands has a mutation, and instead of making glucocorticoids, they make testosterone and ot...
US/THEM-ING TYPICALLY involves inflating the merits of Us concerning core values—we are more correct, wise, moral, and worthy when it comes to knowing what the gods want/running the economy/raising ki...
What happens when children observe domestic violence, warfare, a gang murder, a school massacre? For weeks afterward there is impaired concentration and impulse control. Witnessing gun violence double...
What helps define a particular culture? Values, beliefs, attributions, ideologies.
What is that 95 percent? Some is junk—remnants of pseudogenes inactivated by evolution.fn4,3 But buried in that are the keys to the kingdom, the instruction manual for when to transcribe particular ge...
When testosterone rises after a challenge, it doesn't prompt aggression. Instead it prompts whatever behaviors are needed to maintain status. This changes things tremendously... Engineer social circu...
Why has East Asia provided textbook examples of collectivism?21 The key is how culture is shaped by the way people traditionally made a living, which in turn is shaped by ecology. And in East Asia it’...
Words pack power and these definitions are laden with values, often wildly idiosyncratic ones. Here’s an example, namely the ways I think about the word competition: (a) competition—your lab team race...
Work by Shelley Taylor of UCLA shows that fight or flight is the typical response to stress in males, and naturally, the stress literature is predominantly studies of males by males.83 Things often di...
Young humans are like chimps—six-year-olds not only prefer to be with kids like themselves (by whatever criteria) but readily say so. It isn’t until around age ten that kids learn that some feelings a...
Acute stress strengthens connectivity between the frontal cortex and motoric areas, while weakening frontal-hippocampal connections; the result is decision making that is habitual, rather than incorpo...
Glucocorticoids in
In adults the anterior cingulate cortex activates when they see someone hurt. Ditto for the amygdala and insula, especially in instances of intentional harm—there is anger and disgust. PFC regions inc...
Math performance in Asian American women, built around the stereotypes of Asians being good at math, and women not. Half the subjects were primed to think of themselves as Asian before a math test; th...
Someone’s hand being poked with a needle, and subjects have an isomorphic sensorimotor response—hands tense in empathy. Among both whites and blacks, the response is blunted for other-race hands; the...
Stress weakens frontal connections with the hippocampus—essential for incorporating the new information that should prompt shifting to a new strategy—while strengthening frontal connections with more...
When the frontal cortex labors hard on some cognitive task, immediately afterward individuals are more aggressive and less empathic, charitable, and honest.
Willpower takes metabolic power, thanks to the glucose demands of the frontal cortex. This was the finding that when people are hungry, they become less generous in economic games.
When doing science (or perhaps when doing anything at all in a society as judgmental as our own), be very careful and very certain before pronouncing something to be a norm - because at that instant,...
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