Gossip is good...

Interesting study on the social role of gossip, and how we are hard wired for it..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/29/gossip-good-research-robb-willer?mobile-redirect=false

Extract:
"[what do you mean by 'prosocial' gossip?]
It is a subset of gossip that involves warning other people about
untrustworthy others. We think it is pretty common. We find generous
people are more likely to engage in it and they report doing so out of a
motivation to help others. It is very different from malicious gossip, which might be driven by a desire to tarnish another's reputation or advance oneself."

Happiness, it's complicated...

In principle definitely good that David Cameron is making "happiness" a government target, since surely this is the end to which all policies are means, but as in everything, the devil is in the details, or more precisely, the definition. What kind of happiness is to be pursued? What is really meant by happiness? An unrealistic ideal or a solid, achievable state? So Labour's Andy Burnham is starting an important debate when he says:
"Cameron and Clegg have done this whole thing about happiness, and I am not against the principle, but I think that is the wrong word. There is a slight danger that it sets people up: 'You have got to be happy. If you are not happy, you are failing'," he said. "So talking about mental health in terms of happiness has become the modern way of talking about mental health: 'Mental health is happiness'. And I don't think it is. It is slightly in danger of being a middle-class construct there, builds a bit of materialism into it. I think what we are talking about is resilience. Are you coping? Are you getting by? That is the bottom line."

Labour scorns Cameron's 'happiness' agenda | Society | The Observer

Divine prejudice

Unfortunately it seems people assume not believing a in deity watching over us makes atheists less trustworthy.  But the article mentions some interesting experiments examining this, not only because the distrust could be reduced (reminding people of secular authorities such as the police made them seemingly more open to the idea that people didn't need a holy policeman) but also seem to provide some insights into how different societies might be more or less condusive to atheism.
In Atheists We Distrust: Scientific American

When people look back on their life in their 30s, 40s and older what are some common regrets they have?

(what follows is a reposting fom Quora, but related is my own blog post on regret HERE) 

QUORA :

From Bradley Voytek, BA in psychology and PhD in neuroscience":

110 votes by Laura Copeland, Emily Altman, Monika Kothari, (more)

In 2011 there was a large, national survey of Americans across all age groups that looked at just this. The paper was called Regrets of the Typical American published by Roese and Morrison in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
http://spp.sagepub.com/content/2...

Here's the main finding, outlined by Vaughan Bell over on the Mind Hacks blog:
http://mindhacks.com/2011/03/27/...


The main sources of regret were, in order:

1. romance
2. family
3. education
4. career
5. finance
6. parenting
7. health
8. "other"
9. friends
10. spirituality
11. community
12. leisure
13. self

They also looked at differences between sexes:

Women, who tend to value social relationships more than men, have more regrets of love (romance, family) compared to men. Conversely, men were more likely to have work-related (career, education) regrets. Those who lack either higher education or a romantic relationship hold the most regrets in precisely these areas.


Americans with high levels of education had the most career-related regrets. Apparently, the more education obtained, the more acute may be the sensitivity to aspiration and fulfillment. Moreover, the youngest and least-educated people in our sample, who most likely possess the greatest capability of fixing their regrets, were indeed the most likely to provide fixable regrets.

Vaughan also has some great insight into this work:

The study also found that regrets about things you haven’t done were equally as common as regrets about things you have, no matter how old the person.


The difference between the two is often a psychological one, because we can frame the same regret either way – as regret about an action: 'If only I had not dropped out of school'; or as a regret about an inaction: 'If only I had stayed in school'.


Despite the fact that they are practically equivalent, regrets framed as laments about actions were more common and more intense than regrets about inactions, although inaction regrets tended to be longer lasting.

This was the easiest source to find, but from what I recall from psychology courses, for older adults without children, not having a family is the primary regret, which is corroborated by #2 from the larger group in this study.

update 10 April 2011 : 
another related article is Top 5 Regrets of the dying

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. 
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings 
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends 
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

 

Atheism 2.0

I've often felt that even if one doesn't accept the mysterious supernatural tenets of religions, they are such developed and functional institutions that there is a lot to be reclaimed from then. Not only because religions have arisen and persisted because they tap into important elements of our nature, feelings of community and awe etc., but also because they have perfected many techniques that means they can harnass significant power to have an effect (albeit for bad as well as good) on the world. As this lecture discusses, this is in stark contrast to their generally individual and uncoordinated secular counterparts (artists, philosophers, even film makers) who also try to provide comment and guidance about 'higher' things, but often with much less effect.  As de Botton says, there is a lot secular society can learn, and religion is too important to be left to the religious...

TED: Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0 - Alain de Botton (2011)

Claiming success....

Interesting survey on country differences on the question of fatalism...or how much success is determined by forces outside our control :

"Just 36 percent of Americans believe in this fatalistic statement, while the vast majority of their compatriots are greater believers in self-determination. Put another way, Americans are (not surprisingly) more likely to believe in the American dream.
Americans with less education are more fatalistic..."


http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/fatalism-and-the-american-dream/

Words with word

Am very interested in the possible influence of the tools we use to write on the writing itself, so an interesting article on Microsoft word:

Has Microsoft Word affected the way we work? | Technology | The Observer

an extract:
But has word processing changed the way we write? There have been lots of inconclusive or unconvincing studies of how the technology has affected, say, the quality of student essays – how it facilitates plagiarism. The most interesting academic study I looked at found that writers using computers "spent more time on a first draft and less on finalising a text, pursued a more fragmentary writing process, tended to revise more extensively at the beginning of the writing process, attended more to lower linguistic levels [letter, word] and formal properties of the text, and did not normally undertake any systematic revision of their work before finishing".

Memory, more author than authentic

Interesting article on the narrative nature of memory

The story of the self | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

An extract:
What should we do about this troublesome mental function? For one thing, I don't think we should stop valuing it. Memory can lead us astray, but then it is a machine with many moving parts, and consequently many things that can go awry. Perhaps even that is the wrong way of looking at it. The great pioneer of memory research, Daniel Schacter, has argued that, even when it is failing, memory is doing exactly the thing it is supposed to do. And that purpose is as much about looking into the future as it is about looking into the past. There is only a limited evolutionary advantage in being able to reminisce about what happened to you, but there is a huge payoff in being able to use that information to work out what is going to happen next. Similar neural systems seem to underpin past-related and future-related thinking. Memory is endlessly creative, and at one level it functions just as imagination does.

That's how I think we should value memory: as a means for endlessly rewriting the self. It's important not to push the analogy with storytelling too far, but it's a valuable one.

Work less, so can live more, and more can live

The idea of a shorter working week is something which should be much more discussed. While anathema in our growth based systems, at some stage do need to ask when enough is enough. It's a true point that despite technological advances improving productivity, we work more. Furthermore in times of hardship and unemployment, work sharing would indeed seem like a civilized solution, and one that could be win-win: more free time as a result of helping others, l and an improved society as the social divisions are reduced, surely good?

The fundamental problem is I think psychological. The role of possessions and improvement in our personalities in modern consumer culture is so strong, restricting this would be hard for people to handle, provoking material influenced moral indignation and quandary. But for many reasons it might be time to learn how to work to live, not live to work, and reduced working his might play a role in this

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/08/cut-working-week-urges-thinktank.

every neural pathway has its silver lining

interesting extract from a book on the hard wired nature of optimism :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/01/tali-sharot-the-optimism-bias-extract

some example points (direct quotes) :

• "Scientists who study memory proposed an intriguing answer: memories are susceptible to inaccuracies partly because the neural system responsible for remembering episodes from our past might not have evolved for memory alone. Rather, the core function of the memory system could in fact be to imagine the future ? to enable us to prepare for what has yet to come. The system is not designed to perfectly replay past events, the researchers claimed. It is designed to flexibly construct future scenarios in our minds. As a result, memory also ends up being a reconstructive process, and occasionally, details are deleted and others inserted."
• "Once people started imagining the future, even the most banal life events seemed to take a dramatic turn for the better."
• "While mental time travel has clear survival advantages, conscious foresight came to humans at an enormous price ? the understanding that somewhere in the future, death awaits. Ajit Varki, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the awareness of mortality on its own would have led evolution to a dead end. The despair would have interfered with our daily function, bringing the activities needed for survival to a stop. The only way conscious mental time travel could have arisen over the course of evolution is if it emerged together with irrational optimism. Knowledge of death had to emerge side by side with the persistent ability to picture a bright future."
• "research shows that most of us spend less time mulling over negative outcomes than we do over positive ones. When we do contemplate defeat and heartache, we tend to focus on how these can be avoided."
• "People with mild depression are relatively accurate when predicting future events. They see the world as it is. In other words, in the absence of a neural mechanism that generates unrealistic optimism, it is possible all humans would be mildly depressed."
• "According to social psychologist Leon Festinger, we re-evaluate the options post-choice to reduce the tension that arises from making a difficult decision between equally desirable options. True, sometimes we regret our decisions; our choices can turn out to be disappointing. But on balance, when you make a decision ? even if it is a hypothetical choice ? you will value it more and expect it to bring you pleasure. This affirmation of our decisions helps us derive heightened pleasure from choices that might actually be neutral. Without this, our lives might well be filled with second-guessing. Have we done the right thing? Should we change our mind? We would find ourselves stuck, overcome by indecision and unable to move forward."
• "by scanning the brains of people as they process both positive and negative information about the future. The findings are striking: when people learn, their neurons faithfully encode desirable information that can enhance optimism but fail at incorporating unexpectedly undesirable information."