Carolyn Wilke writes: Young jumping spiders dangle by a thread through the night, in a box, in a lab. Every so often, their legs curl and their spinnerets twitch — and the retinas of their eyes, visible through their translucent exoskeletons, shift back and forth. “What these spiders are doing seems to be resembling — very closely — REM sleep,” says Daniela Rößler, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. During REM (which stands for rapid eye…
Peter Sagal writes: [Cult expert, Daniella Mestyanek] Young doesn’t believe that anybody can be argued out of Trumpism (or any other firmly held belief). People can save only themselves, as she did [when she escaped from the Children of God]. But she argues that such self-rescues are happening all around us. “Twenty years ago,” she told me, “when I walked away from a cult, it was much rarer to meet Americans like me, who are completely estranged from their families…
Brian Butterworth writes: You might think of counting as something that people do involving the words one, two, three and so on. But we don’t require the use of these words to enumerate a collection of objects. Indeed, some languages do not have long lists of counting words. In studies of children who speak languages with a smaller set of such words (eg, words for one, two, few and many), such as the Indigenous Australian language Warlpiri, my colleagues and I found that they were at least as accurate…
PsyPost reports: A series of three studies in Germany found that people living in poverty frequently experience exclusion from different aspects of society and devaluation leading to the feeling of shame. Such shame, in turn, increases their support for authoritarianism due to the promise that that they will be included in the society again authoritarian leaders typically make. The study was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Poverty is defined as a lack of the capability to live…
Michael Lamb writes: The binary between optimism and pessimism does not capture the complexity of Augustine’s thought. As concepts, ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’ came to be employed only in the 18th century. Moreover, the binary overlooks Augustine’s more nuanced account of hope as a virtue that finds a middle way between the vices of presumption and despair. The difference that it makes when we understand hope as a virtue is often missed in contemporary discourse, which tends to characterise hope as an attitude or emotion and to…
PsyPost reports: Is there a bullshit blind spot? A series of two studies recently found that people who were the worst at detecting bullshit not only grossly overestimated their detection ability, but also overestimated their ability compared to other people. In other words, they not only believe that they are better at detecting BS than they actually are, they also believe that they are better at it than the average person. At the same time, those who were best at…
Sujata Gupta writes: In 1961, renowned German novelist Günter Grass openly criticized communist East Germany for building the Berlin Wall ostensibly to prevent West Germans from infiltrating the country. In reality, the wall was more effective at preventing East Germans from defecting. From that point on, East German secret police known as the Stasi shadowed Grass, a West German who frequently visited his neighbors to the East. In their notes, the Stasi refer to Grass with the code name “Bolzen,”…
Elise Loehnen writes: As Carl Jung famously said, nothing is more influential in a child’s life than the unlived life of the parent. My mother’s unlived life ricochets inside my life. My mom is an ardent reader — it’s probably no coincidence that my brother is a book editor and I make my living with words. And like her, I have children — but I wanted mine. In this anxious inheritance from my mother and my grandmother, I’ve both under-…
Laura Niemi, Jesse Graham, and John M Doris write: Classic research says we overlook situational factors in explaining people’s misdeeds. But the reality is more complex. The new principal of a school on the verge of closure has vowed to turn things around. Half a year in, however, the outlook is bleak. If students do not meet national performance baselines on their upcoming standardised tests, it will be the last straw for the struggling school. The principal knows that his teachers…
Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas writes: Every year, the World Happiness Report ranks 146 countries around the globe by their average level of happiness. Scandinavian countries usually top the list, the U.S. falls someplace in the mid-teens, and war-torn and deeply impoverished countries are at the bottom. The happiness scores come from a survey of life satisfaction, which goes something like this: Considering your life as a whole and using the mental image of a ladder, with the best possible life as…
Alex Orlando writes: Well, damn. Maybe you stubbed your toe first thing in the morning. Or some thoughtless commuter forced you to slam the brakes on the drive to work. Perhaps you’re just fed up with it all and feel like sinking to your knees and cursing the heavens. If you’ve ever suppressed the urge to unleash a string of obscenities, maybe think again. Some research suggests that it might be a better idea to simply let the filth fly….
Rebecca Solnit writes: As the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded, I was reminded over and over again of the behaviour of abusive ex-husbands and boyfriends. At first he thinks that he can simply bully her into returning. When it turns out she has no desire to return, he shifts to vengeance. Putin insisted that Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia and didn’t have a separate existence. He expected his army to grab and subjugate with ease, even be welcomed. Now…
The New York Times reports: Cockatoos contain contradictions. “They behave like gremlins,” said Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, a biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. His colleague Alice Auersperg agreed. “Imagine a toddler with pliers in their head,” she said, that is also able to fly. But just like toddlers, cockatoos can be sweet and curious, always exploring the world around them. Dr. Auersperg and other researchers showed the innateness of this curiosity in 2021, when they reported that wild Goffin’s…
Mercedes Valmisa writes: What if I told you that there’s no such thing as an individual action? That every time you eat, walk up the stairs or read a book, you are not the sole agent behind what you are doing, but are engaged in a process of co-creation – as much acted-upon as acting? To grasp what I mean here, imagine riding a horse. While I can effortlessly distinguish between myself and a horse, I’m aware that neither I…
Joshua Benton writes: Eyeballs. That’s what everyone on the internet seems to want — eyeballs. To be clear, it’s not actual eyeballs, in the aqueous humor sense, that they’re looking for. It’s getting your eyeballs pointed at whatever content they produce — their game, their app, their news story, whatever — and however many ad units they can squeeze into your field of view. Your attention is literally up for auction hundreds or thousands of times a day — your…
Barbara J King writes: Human exceptionalism takes many forms but most share an assumption that our species displays singularly complex ways of being, thinking and feeling. On this perspective, other animals’ capacities are inferior, and so other animals’ lives are also seen as inferior. It’s only a myth, though, that other-than-human animals inevitably live moment to moment. Many mammals and birds remember and learn from past experiences, and anticipate with joy or fear what may be coming next. Recognition of…