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aamukherjee A Slice of Entropie -
alchymista Alchymista -
crownedrose Fading Like A Dead Star -
expose-the-light Quarks to Quasars -
ikenbot CWL -
abluegirl A Blue Girl -
perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
![ikenbot:
Men and Women Can’t Be “Just Friends”
Side note: This title is actually a bit, no, very misleading. The study does indeed show that men think of romantic or sexually beneficial relationships from friends more often than women, but the conclusions that can be reached in this study could also be a smoking gun showing just how effective our culture is at molding our minds to a gender binary. Which reminds me of the answer I gave someone who had asked about how men should approach women, because my suspicion is that men can be “Just friends” with women, but our culture is so assertive and conditioned to striving for these types of relationships that we easily forget. Plenty of media and outside advertisement subconsciously and most times very obviously altering our behavior to pay more attention to our sexual desires as men and for women to be the “wholesome” weak-links that need us. While women on the other hand are suggested and most times even forced into that image. Sure men will have that natural urge, but these urges alone are not enough to merit this behavior because this urge can be easily controlled, those that can’t control it tend to be those who are more heavily influenced by that gender binary culture and the behavioral patterns that come with it. Just a thought, but read on for the study and make your own conclusions.
Can heterosexual men and women ever be “just friends”? Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as lurid, or movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. However, the possibility remains that this apparently platonic coexistence is merely a façade, an elaborate dance covering up countless sexual impulses bubbling just beneath the surface.
New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.
In order to investigate the viability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships—a topic that has been explored more on the silver screen than in the science lab—researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab. Privacy was paramount—for example, imagine the fallout if two friends learned that one—and only one—had unspoken romantic feelings for the other throughout their relationship. In order to ensure honest responses, the researchers not only followed standard protocols regarding anonymity and confidentiality, but also required both friends to agree—verbally, and in front of each other—to refrain from discussing the study, even after they had left the testing facility. These friendship pairs were then separated, and each member of each pair was asked a series of questions related to his or her romantic feelings (or lack thereof) toward the friend with whom they were taking the study.
The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.
Men were also more willing to act on this mistakenly perceived mutual attraction. Both men and women were equally attracted to romantically involved opposite-sex friends and those who were single; “hot” friends were hot and “not” friends were not, regardless of their relationship status. However, men and women differed in the extent to which they saw attached friends as potential romantic partners. Although men were equally as likely to desire “romantic dates” with “taken” friends as with single ones, women were sensitive to their male friends’ relationship status and uninterested in pursuing those who were already involved with someone else.
I highlighted this part towards the end of the snippet because I wanted to again point out that this may be because of men’s misogynistic mindset that is largely attributed to our traditional culture that has been having trouble with keeping with the times. I believe we [men] are more willing to act because we are given more entitlement and power over women and this gives us an extreme overdose of unnecessary confidence in our sexuality despite how messed up and possessive it is in reality.
Full Article](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mccwqbXY2a1qbn5m1o1_500.jpg)
Men and Women Can’t Be “Just Friends”
Side note: This title is actually a bit, no, very misleading. The study does indeed show that men think of romantic or sexually beneficial relationships from friends more often than women, but the conclusions that can be reached in this study could also be a smoking gun showing just how effective our culture is at molding our minds to a gender binary. Which reminds me of the answer I gave someone who had asked about how men should approach women, because my suspicion is that men can be “Just friends” with women, but our culture is so assertive and conditioned to striving for these types of relationships that we easily forget. Plenty of media and outside advertisement subconsciously and most times very obviously altering our behavior to pay more attention to our sexual desires as men and for women to be the “wholesome” weak-links that need us. While women on the other hand are suggested and most times even forced into that image. Sure men will have that natural urge, but these urges alone are not enough to merit this behavior because this urge can be easily controlled, those that can’t control it tend to be those who are more heavily influenced by that gender binary culture and the behavioral patterns that come with it. Just a thought, but read on for the study and make your own conclusions.
Can heterosexual men and women ever be “just friends”? Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as lurid, or movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. However, the possibility remains that this apparently platonic coexistence is merely a façade, an elaborate dance covering up countless sexual impulses bubbling just beneath the surface.
New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.
In order to investigate the viability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships—a topic that has been explored more on the silver screen than in the science lab—researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab. Privacy was paramount—for example, imagine the fallout if two friends learned that one—and only one—had unspoken romantic feelings for the other throughout their relationship. In order to ensure honest responses, the researchers not only followed standard protocols regarding anonymity and confidentiality, but also required both friends to agree—verbally, and in front of each other—to refrain from discussing the study, even after they had left the testing facility. These friendship pairs were then separated, and each member of each pair was asked a series of questions related to his or her romantic feelings (or lack thereof) toward the friend with whom they were taking the study.
The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.
Men were also more willing to act on this mistakenly perceived mutual attraction. Both men and women were equally attracted to romantically involved opposite-sex friends and those who were single; “hot” friends were hot and “not” friends were not, regardless of their relationship status. However, men and women differed in the extent to which they saw attached friends as potential romantic partners. Although men were equally as likely to desire “romantic dates” with “taken” friends as with single ones, women were sensitive to their male friends’ relationship status and uninterested in pursuing those who were already involved with someone else.
I highlighted this part towards the end of the snippet because I wanted to again point out that this may be because of men’s misogynistic mindset that is largely attributed to our traditional culture that has been having trouble with keeping with the times. I believe we [men] are more willing to act because we are given more entitlement and power over women and this gives us an extreme overdose of unnecessary confidence in our sexuality despite how messed up and possessive it is in reality.
ikenbot
There’s a reason genius and solitude seem to go hand in hand, a new study says. Social rejection leads to creative problem solving.
Don’t let rejection get you down—it might be the ticket to creativity, science says. That’s right: If regular rejection doesn’t cause you to lose all self-confidence and withdraw from the world entirely, it just might boost your ability to think outside of the mainstream and draw upon a unique worldview, suggesting that the kind of people society considers “geniuses” might tend to have a go-it-alone, loner mentality.
Research conducted by Cornell and Johns Hopkins University researchers has shown that people who are able to handle rejection in the proper manner—by shrugging it off and blazing their own, independent trails—can experience heightened creativity and even commercial success through an ability to eschew mainstream thought and groupthink and instead pursue their own creative solutions to problems. They tested their hypothesis through a series of experiments in which they manipulated the experience of social rejection; subjects in the study were led to believe that everyone in a group exercise could choose whom to work with on a team project, only to be told later that no one had selected them for a team.
For people with an independent mindset, this rejection inspired them to go on and complete the exercise in a way that was deemed more creative (we’re not exactly sure how “creativity” was measured). For people without an independent mindset—well, we’re not really sure what kind of impact this exclusion had on them (hopefully someone later told them it was just an experiment, it was all in good fun, and really, everyone here thinks you’re great).
The researchers acknowledge that for some, the consequences of rejection can be quite negative. Their research is only intended to show that for those of a certain mindset, social rejection can have a silver lining, driving home something that we more or less already knew: it’s not easy being a genius.
(via ikenbot)
Think You’re a Comic Genius? Maybe You’re Just Overconfident
No matter how badly the joke is told, it will sometimes elicit a few polite laughs.
Why?
Because social norms make us averse to providing negative feedback, says Joyce Ehrlinger, a Florida State University assistant professor of psychology whose latest laboratory research recreated everyday interactions in which people might feel pressured to withhold negative information.
Interesting, I wonder if this sort of behavior applies to other occasions in society where expressing negative information could be useful.
Study: Proof That We Sexually Objectify Women
We look at women the same way we look at houses and sandwiches: as composites of attractive parts.
Problem: Few would argue that the objectification of women is a real thing — and a real problem — but as yet there’s been no cognitive explanation for it in a literal sense. Do we really look at women differently than we do men, and are they actually objectified in the eye — and brain — of the beholder?
Methodology: Images of average, fully clothed individuals were quickly flashed before the eyes of participants. After each one, the participants would then be shown two side-by-side images that zoomed in on one, “sexual” aspect of the individual (for example, a woman’s midriff) and asked to identify the version that hadn’t been modified. The experiment was also reversed, so that participants first looked at a specific part and then had to identify it in the context of an entire body. The test was designed to clue researchers in on whether the participants were using global or local cognitive processing while looking at the images — in other words, whether they perceived the individuals as a whole or as an assemblage of their various parts.
Results: Regardless of gender, participants consistently recognized women’s sexual body parts more easily when presented in isolation. Men’s sexual body parts, on the other hand, were more memorable as part of their entire bodies.
Conclusion: The cognitive process behind our perception of objects is the same that we use when looking at women, and both genders are guilty of taking in the parts instead of the whole. When we look at men, we use global processing to see them more fully as people.
The full study,”Seeing women as objects: The sexual body part recognition bias,” is published in the European Journal of Social Psychology.
Why were the statues on Easter Island built? No one is sure. What is sure is that over 800 large stone statues exist there.
The Easter Island statues, stand, on the average, over twice as tall as a person and have over 200 times as much mass. Few specifics are known about the history or meaning of the unusual statues, but many believe that they were created about 500 years ago in the images of local leaders of a lost civilization. Pictured above, some of the stone giants were illuminated in 2009 under the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy.
(via fieldnotesbiologyculture)
expose-the-light
Alcohol is more dangerous than illegal drugs like heroin and crack cocaine, according to a new study.
British experts evaluated substances including alcohol, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and marijuana, ranking them based on how destructive they are to the individual who takes them and to society as a whole.
Researchers analyzed how addictive a drug is and how it harms the human body, in addition to other criteria like environmental damage caused by the drug, its role in breaking up families and its economic costs, such as health care, social services, and prison.
Neuropharmacologist David Nutt, MD, of Imperial College London, and colleagues rated 20 different drugs on a scale that takes into account the various harms caused by a drug. Drugs are rated on nine harms a drug causes an individual and seven harms a drug causes society.
The scale, developed by a panel of experts called the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ICSD), ranges from 0 (no harm) to 100 (greatest possible harm). It is weighted so that a drug that scores 50 is half as harmful as a drug that scores 100.
“The highest and lowest overall harm scores … are 72 for alcohol and 5 for mushrooms,” Nutt and colleagues calculate. “The ICSD scores lend support to the widely accepted view that alcohol is an extremely harmful drug both to users and to society.”
Alcohol was found to be the most harmful drug to society and the fourth most harmful drug to users.
The findings should come as no surprise: Alcohol has been linked to more than 60 diseases.
Look around and it’s impossible to miss the importance of social interactions to human society. They form the basis of our families, our governments, and even our global economy. But how did we become social in the first place? Researchers have long believed that it was a gradual process, evolving from couples to clans to larger communities. A new analysis, however, indicates that primate societies expanded in a burst, most likely because there was safety in numbers.
To the researchers’ surprise, the most sensible solution suggested that the solitary ancestor started banding together not in pairs, as scientists had thought, but as loose groups of both sexes, as the team reports online today in Nature. Given the modern distribution of social organizations, the most likely time for this shift was around 52 million years ago, when the ancestors of monkeys and apes split off from the ancestors of lemurs and other prosimian primates.
“What will the neighbours think?” is a question people with autism are unlikely to ask. While the rest of us tend to act more charitably when being watched, those with autism are just as generous when alone.
Keise Izuma at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues gave $45 to 10 people with autism and to 11 without, with the option of donating various portions to charity. When under a watchful eye, non-autistic people donated more often and more generously than when alone. People with autism were unaffected by the observer (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1107038108).
cwnl:
How a Physicist Sees the Universe: Messy and Sublime
Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall thinks about many things. Not just particle physics and cosmology, which are her forte, but also about the process of science, the nature of risk and uncertainty and even the approach that art and religion take to understanding the world.
Lisa Randall is the author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. She is a professor of physics at Harvard University and, in 2007, was named one of Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People.” Read an excerpt from the book.
In her latest book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, Randall writes about some of the most important scientific quests of today: the search for the Higgs boson, unraveling the mystery of dark matter and dark energy, and the possibility of discovering new physics at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Expanding beyond this scope, though, she also presents a scientists’ take on topics ranging from the recent financial crisis to the role of asymmetry in art.
Wired recently sat down with Randall to talk about her view of the universe.
Wired: Your book seems to be mainly about two things: the current state of particle physics and the process of science. Why did you choose to write on these two topics together?
Lisa Randall: Firstly, I didn’t want to just do what I had done in my previous book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions; I wanted to do something interesting that was different.
So really the seed for the book was to go into this idea of the nature of science. I think it’s an interesting story just how science is done, and I think that process tends to get oversimplified and overstated a lot of the time.
Having decided to do that, I thought I should round it with actual science. So I also write about the current state of particle physics and the Large Hadron Collider. People can get so caught up in thinking, you know, this is all so abstract but I think it’s important to understand that there are concrete testable results.
Wired: You write that the process of science can be complicated and messy. Why do you think it’s important for readers to know that?
Randall: There can sometimes be this fear among laypeople: I don’t understand everything in science perfectly so I just can’t say anything about it. I think it’s good to know that we scientists are also confused some of the time. This way we can invite others in. They can participate in understanding, and apply scientific methods to other contexts in their lives.
The process of science is difficult and challenging. It involves always being aware that your ideas might be right or they might be wrong. I think it’s that kind of balance that makes science so interesting. I mean, if we had all the answers already, that would be a lot less exciting as a research field.
(via scienceandstuff)
Gender Gap Vanishes in Female-Empowered Cultures
One of the issues that has prevented the full participation of females in math and the sciences is the persistent belief that males have innate math skills that are superior to those of females. Even as studies show that the math gap disappears in countries with greater gender equality, it seems to persist in higher education, which allows it to be transmitted to new generations.
But, even as basic math skills have evened out in many countries, differences in spatial reasoning abilities have not followed as quickly, even in places like Sweden and Norway, where math skills are now equal. This raises the prospect that there is some biological difference between the sexes — it just isn’t basic math. A new study in PNAS, however, suggests that spatial reasoning differences may also be the product of society.
The study takes advantage of a convenient natural experiment. There are two tribes in Northeast India that are very similar in many ways. They both share the same agrarian lifestyle and diet, reside in close proximity, and DNA tests indicate that they are closely related. The biggest difference between them is culture. Among other differences, the Karbi are patrilineal; women do not typically own land, and the oldest son inherits the family’s property after the death of the parents. The Khasi could not be more different in this regard. Men are not allowed to own land at all, any money or goods earned by a male are handed over to his wife or sister, and inheritances go to the youngest daughter in the family.
