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Psychology

Collective Intention And ‘The Power Of Thought’ – A 9/11 Experiment

A group of people are joining together for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center to discover whether their 'collective intention' can bring peace to the world.What does that even mean?  The 9/11 Intention Experiment is the latest of 23 Web-based experiments carried out by author Lynne McTaggart to try and test the power of thought to change...

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Meat Eaters Are Anti-Social Psychologist Diederik Stapel Sacked

Can we get three cheers for psychology?  The bulk of the quality researchers in the field have consistently been under fire because of researchers like Satoshi Kanazawa and Marc Hauser but have started taking their discipline back.Circling the wagons around researchers was never a good idea but, well, things happen and psychologists are people too.  Yet over the last year they have...

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9/11 And The Death Of The Ego

Why would Mohamed Atta graciously let a car rental agent know the check oil light was on in the car he returned and then help crash a plane full of people and fuel into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, an act of simple religious hatred?It's a puzzle of psychology.  The ability to deal kindly with people on an individual level and then demonize them when they are in a group has been...

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We’re All Better Than Average – And Rich College Kids Moreso

There's long been a maddening belief by a subset of psychologists who have never actually been to the Eastern part of the world that Asia is some collectivist Utopia.When it comes to inflated self-importance - hubris, even - some research contends, there is more of it in the west because Western culture prides itself on independence, personal success and uniqueness while in the East where harmony...

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Maybe We Need A Geopolitical Rumspringa

Norway just had a tragedy - the kind of random violence that social scientists, who we all wish would take a holiday during horrific events, will try and find correlation and causation for, like he was right wing or he was left wing or he was angry about farm prices or a video game store didn't having something he wanted or even that he didn't get enough sex, once evolutionary psychologists dive...

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Women Fake It Less Than Men

I just finished watching the Women's World Cup semifinal football match, USA versus France, and am currently preparing to watch Japan versus Sweden and an important difference is immediately noticeable about womens' matches compared to men's.A lot less flopping.If you are not up on complex technical sports jargon, flopping is when, after a minor collision, you fall down and grasp a body part with...

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