Testing An Evo Psych Theory Outside Of The Lab: Prestige And Dominance-Based Social Hierarchies Emerge Even Amongst Cornish Choirs And Chess Clubs
By Matthew Warren
Psychologists have noticed that aspiring leaders generally pursue one of two different approaches for getting to the top of the social food-chain. Some people exert influence by building up skills or knowledge that command respect and deference from their peers – known as the prestige strategy. Others prefer to rule by fear instead, forcing others to fall into line – the dominance strategy. This dichotomy has even been suggested to account for the vastly different leadership styles of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
But many of the studies that have looked at the dynamics of prestige and dominance ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - June 11, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: evolutionary psych Social Source Type: blogs
EPA Co-benefits Are Fine, But the Agency Must Tell the Whole Story
Should you be worried about mercury emitted from power plants?Sure, but only if you are a pregnant woman, who during gestation consumes about 220 pounds of fish caught from exclusively the top ten percent most polluted fresh waters of the United States, despite all the signs along these rivers and lakes warning “DO NOT EAT THE FISH!”Don ’t take my word for it. I’m simply relaying EPA science. And not the ‘bad” kind produced by the Trump administration; rather, I’m talking about virtuous EPA science as practiced by the Obama administration.A little background: mercury emissions aren ’t a direct threat to hum...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 10, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: William Yeatman Source Type: blogs
B. Hussein Obama saved you a bundle
There seems to have been some question about whether the ACA actually reduced health care costs. The answer,from the Office of the Actuary of the Department of Health and Human Services, is that it cumulatively from 2010 to 2017 the ACA reduced health care spending a total of $2.3 trillion. Savings in 2017 alone were $650 billion.No doubt this will be a headline story at Fox News.Update: A reader has drawn my attention to certain mendacious comments by industrial shills on Dr. Emanuel ' s article. So let me make a couple of things clear:In some of the state exchanges, premiums increased after the first year of the ACA. Thi...
Source: Stayin' Alive - June 6, 2019 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Ban the Box and Statistical Discrimination
With 25 percent of the world ’s prison population, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. Over 600,000 people are released from American prisons each year and, sadly, about two-thirds of them will be rearrested within three years. Creating opportunities for people released from prison to rein tegrate into society has rightly become a key focus of criminal justice reformers.In recent years, “Ban The Box” policies and legislation, which require companies to delay asking whether job applicants have a criminal record until later in the hiring process, have become a popular policy respons...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 4, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Peter Van Doren Source Type: blogs
America Is Nearly Alone on Iran Policy
The Trump administration continues to pursue an extremely confrontational policy toward Iran, and Washington finds itself increasingly alone in doing so. Even most of the traditional European allies show little enthusiasm for the U.S. approach. Indeed, many of them now are openly defying Washington’s wishes. As I discuss in a recentNational Interest Onlinearticle, such resistance has been building for some time, but the administration ’s newest actions have intensified the opposition. NATO governments are especially uneasy about Washington ’s decision todeploy B-52 bombers, sendan additional 1,500 troops to t...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 3, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Ted Galen Carpenter Source Type: blogs
The personal and the political
When we engage in political discourse in the United States, we confront a fundamental problem.I will outsource much of this discussion to Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, which as you may know is a conservative think tank. First:[H]owever awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and s...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 30, 2019 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Impeach John Bolton?
“We’re not looking for regime change [in Iran]. I want to make that clear,”President Trump said Monday at a news conference in Japan, “nobody wants to see terrible things happen, especially me.” That’s good to hear, but has Trump’s National Security Advisor gotten the message?It ’s theundeterrable John Bolton, after all, who ’s been at the epicenter of the rumors of war plaguing Washington in recent weeks. It’s Bolton whoordered up a Pentagon plan for “retaliatory and offensive options” to check Iran, including a 120,000 troop surge to the region, and Bolton whoblustered that a recent carrier-strike...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 29, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Gene Healy Source Type: blogs
Trump Isn ’t Only “Constitutional Crisis” Afflicting Congressional Oversight
Earlier this week,Vox ’s Sean Illing asked 10 law professors whether President Trump ’s sweeping refusal to cooperate with congressional investigators has plunged the nation into “a constitutional crisis.” I recommend the article, and I also observe that I’m 100% on Congress’s side regarding the legitimacy of its information queries. Indeed, I’m with my colleague Gene Healy, who has rightfullyTweeted that, “#ExecutivePrivilege is something judges just made up out of penumbras and emanations of Article II.”For this post, however, I argue that congressional oversight,per se, is in its own state of “cons...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 17, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: William Yeatman Source Type: blogs
Federal Disaster Spending Boosted by Politics/Population
Despite rising federal deficits, Congress is set to pass another budget-busting spending bill. This time it is a $19 billion package of disaster-related subsidies.TheWashington Post reports“taxpayer spending on U.S. disaster fund explodes.” It documents increases in disaster spending by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In a typical recent year, “spending on the federal disaster relief fund is almost 10 times higher than it was three decades ago, even after adjusti ng for inflation.”The story identifies two causes of the spending increases: climate change and population growth in disaster-prone areas....
Source: Cato-at-liberty - May 15, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs
Freedumb of Speech, revisited
Hear, hear, professor Campos. This concerns, proximally, Harvard ' s decision not to continue to have a certain law professor serve as " dean " of a residence hall. Harvard happens to use the term " dean " for this position but that is not the usual meaning of the word, which in most cases (including ours) refers to a person who has responsibility for a school or an educational program. This is really what would normally be called a house parent position -- a faculty member or couple who live in the residence hall and look after the quality of residential life. There appear to have been numerous reasons for this decision -...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 14, 2019 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
What People Don ’ t Know About Introverts and Extroverts
When you characterize someone as an introvert, you are most likely referring to behaviors that seem quiet and withdrawn. We think of introverts as shy and anti-social, preferring to be alone or with one or two people rather than at a party or in a crowd. Extroverts on the other hand are assumed to be gregarious, loud and in search of the next party. There are many misconceptions, however, regarding these general beliefs about introverts and extroverts.
The terms introvert and extrovert were first coined by psychiatrist Carl Jung in the 1920s. Over the years they have become synonymous with certain behaviors and traits. In...
Source: World of Psychology - May 12, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Kurt Smith, Psy.D., LMFT, LPCC, AFC Tags: Communication Friends History of Psychology Personality Source Type: blogs
The “Back Story” of the JAMA Wellness Smackdown (Part 1)
This article became the single most influential article in Health Affairs history, with 935 academic citations alone, plus an untold number of start-ups, corporate program implementations, and references in lay publications.
Unfortunately, when you attract that much attention with a finding that is basically fabricated, someone is bound to notice. In this case, the someone was me. (I also encouraged RAND’s ace wellness researcher, Soeren Mattke, to take part in the effort, which he expertly did.) It turns out that most if not all of the studies in this meta-analysis never should have made it to pe...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 29, 2019 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Health Policy Al Lewis Wellness Workplace Wellness workplace wellness programs Source Type: blogs
The Fight over Particulate Matter
The EPA and conventional air pollution regulations are back in the news. NPRreported that the seven-member Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), which provides the EPA with technical advice for National Ambient Air Quality Standards, is “considering guidelines that upend basic air pollution science.” But NPR’s oversimplified depiction of a settled scientific debate ignores real misgivings about the science that has justified the regulations and provides an opportunity to ask questions about the proper role of science in publi c policy.The pollutant in question is particulate matter (PM), tiny particles or ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 22, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Peter Van Doren Source Type: blogs
A New Installment in the Libya Tragedy
The Libya tragedy that Barack Obama ’s administration unleashed with a U.S.-led NATO military intervention in 2011 has entered yet another violent phase. Forces loyal to Field MarshalKhalifa Haftar, aone-time CIA asset that Washington now opposes, arewaging an offensive against the so-called Government of National Accord (GNA), based in Tripoli. Both theUnited Nations Security Council and the European Union support the GNA and have passed resolutionsdemanding that Haftar ’s troops cease their advance and adhere to thecease fire and plan for nation-wide elections that French President Emmanuel Macron negotiated last yea...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 16, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Ted Galen Carpenter Source Type: blogs
Electronic Vindication
Dilbert by Scott Adams, courtesy www.dilbert.comMy very first blog post as Doctor Dalai went online on 1/29/2005, beginning with a rant about ScImage lifted from one of my early AuntMinnie.com entries. In the subsequent fourteen years, my writing has become slightly more sophisticated (emphasizeslightly), but my basic premise has not wavered: PACS interfaces by and large are not as user-friendly as they could be, in other words, theySUCK. Forgive the epithet, but that is a very accurate statement, and most would agree.Most, but not the vendors. In browsing through my years of navel-gazing, I came across several entries whe...
Source: Dalai's PACS Blog - April 15, 2019 Category: Radiology Source Type: blogs
