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Scientific Encounters
Tell subjects they scored in the bottom 20% on some performance measure and they'll feel rotten. Expose women to a 15-minute video of gorgeous models and their self-esteem will take a beating. So, sure, you can make experimental subjects feel bad by exposing them to certain conditions in a lab, but do those conditions prevail in everyday life?
Beliefs serve decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Without uncertainty, we just act. I don't "believe" the ground will stop my foot when I walk....That's just the neural prediction and reward-seeking machinery running smoothly. It's when the machinery gets stuck that the brain shifts into belief mode to help break the logjam.
Jumping the groove from dopamine to self-efficacy: here we go!
But science is a way of thinking, not a body of knowledge. Science is a way to acquire knowledge. Science is about being ruthless with oneself and the evidence; proposing and testing hypotheses, over and over; being careful, tentative, incremental and alert to alternative explanations.
Want to convince someone the situation is urgent and immediate action is imperative? Well, you're not going to get very far by laying it on with a sledgehammer. This approach usually backfires by triggering resistance and motivating counterarguments.
Slowly but surely the US is catching on to the advantages of using nurse practitioners as independent primary care gatekeepers. A big factor in the gradual acceptance of this expanded role for nurse practitioners is the shortage of GPs, which has left millions of Americans without access to primary care providers.
In the US, the incentives are aligned to test more, treat more, and charge more. It's no surprise that, on average, the US spends almost twice as much on its healthcare system than other developed countries. And it's no surprise that our doctors are among the highest paid in the world.
How do we find a balance between satisfaction with what is and wanting more? Easy for an old person to say: it is enough. Not so when you’re young and chomping at the bit.
Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being “agreeable” rather than “assertive,” showing a “lower stress tolerance,” or being “neurotic.” - Google CEO Sundar Pichai
"Technical manuals for 47 interest inventories were used, yielding 503,188 respondents. Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d _ 0.93) on the Things–People dimension."
- Su, Rounds and Armstrong (2009) Men and things, women and people: A meta-analysis of sex differences in interests.
Are male engineers simply more sexist and less welcoming of female students and coworkers than, say, male doctors and lawyers? Why would that be? If we were only talking about the perniciousness of men, we would expect similar gender patterns in a broad range of traditionally male-dominated occupations. But we don't. There's something special about engineering.
That biology influences personality isn't saying personality is fixed or that biology has a bigger effect than other types of influence. Predispositions can be minimized, neutralized or reversed. Personal experience, socialization, and workplace culture are incredibly important. No one is denying that.
...the Diversity Memo's author says that, on average, women are more open, people-oriented, gregarious, anxious, and agreeable than men and men are more thing-oriented, systemizing, assertive, and status-driven. He further notes that biology accounts only partly for these gender differences, many of which are small, and there is considerable overlap between men and women.
Recently a Google engineer was fired for writing a very long memo about gender differences and its implications for company diversity policy. There was an uproar and he got fired. This post addresses a single word in that memo: neuroticism.
Our neuronal networks are strengthened through repeated activation. When we repeatedly engage in a behavior, we strengthen the neural substrate underlying that behavior, including connections within the brain's attentional control system. That's because anything we do requires we attend to the world in specific ways, reflecting what matters to us in the moment: our goals, values, and concerns.
It also makes a world of difference when the scientific consensus on climate change is represented as nearly unanimous (e.g., 97%) rather than merely a large majority (e.g., 90%). The former intimidates and discourages potential dissent; the latter, not so much.
The Bray and von Storch 5th International Survey of Climate Scientists consists of over a hundred statements related to climate change and its effects. For each statement, respondents indicated their level of agreement or opinion via a seven-point scale. Around a third of the 651 respondents were involved (as author, reviewer, etc.) with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (2014 IPCC AR5).
...we tend to become more categorical in our opinions when they serve as markers of belonging to a moral community.
Living in the jungle is hard: building nests every evening, extracting the nutritious stuff from thousands of plants. That takes deliberation, reasoning, inference, problem-solving, weighing the pros and the cons.
The idea is that competing and cooperating with one's fellows takes smarts. Individual animals who are better at these social interactions are more likely to transmit their genes to future generations. Over evolutionary time, you get a smarter species.