Psychology, morality and more
From Judgment and Decision Making, Ingmar H. A. Franke, Irina Georgieva and Peter Muris (Erasmus): The rich get richer and the poor get poorer: On risk aversion in behavioral decision-making; Jochen Reb (SMU) and Terry Connolly (Arizona): Possession, feelings of ownership and the endowment effect; David Gal (Stanford): A psychological law of inertia and the illusion of loss aversion; Irina Cojuharenco (Pompeu Fabra): Lay intuitions about overall evaluations of experiences; Christine R. Harris, Michael Jenkins, and Dale Glaser (UCSD): Gender Differences in Risk Assessment: Why do Women Take Fewer Risks than Men?; and an essay on Amos Tversky's contributions to legal scholarship.
A review of Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? by Galen Strawson et al. A review of What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being by Richard Kraut. A review of Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm by F. M. Kamm.
From TNR, Cass Sunstein reviews The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip G. Zimbardo. A review of Psychology and the Natural Law of Reparation. A review of Beyond Moral Judgment by Alice Crary. From Newsweek, are we who we think we are? Some intriguing research with kids finds that personality is a lot more malleable than previously thought. Researchers at University College London are delicately re-creating Stanley Milgram’s work using computer-generated characters instead of actors.
From Free Inquiry, humanism and the science of happiness: An interview with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience; and can psychology be positive about religion? The Prince of Reason: An interview with Albert Ellis, developer of rational emotive behavior therapy. The groundbreaking treatment rests on the premise that most of our emotional problems are based on irrational beliefs (and more). This Is Your Life: The way people talk about their pasts reveals a lot about how they approach and write the future. From Britannica, an article on understanding emotion and the feeling person.
From Monitor on Psychology, that teenage feeling: Harvard researchers may have found biological clues to quirky adolescent behavior; and observers are quicker to see anger on men’s faces and happiness on women’s. A simple case of gender stereotyping, or something more deeply rooted? John Shook investigates. Boys and their fighting toys: A review of Achtung Schweinehund: A boy's own story of imaginary combat. With hours of training, animals can learn to solve simple math problems, but do they have a natural number sense?
