In a recent comments section, Gregory Wahl argued to me that religion is so deeply rooted in psychological needs, specifically the longing for immortality, that there is an inherent limitation to the ability of all my philosophical arguments to dissuade the faithful. As this line of reasoning goes, they do not believe for intellectual reasons [...]
Really interesting (and unsurprising) results: In a series of studies, more than 600 participants were placed in anxiety-provoking or neutral situations and then asked to describe their personal goals and rate their degree of conviction for their religious ideals. This included asking participants whether they would give their lives for their faith or support a [...]
Really fascinating bit of radio audio discussing a variation of the Milgram experiment performed on macaque monkeys, comparing its results to when the actual Milgram experiment was first done on humans: Thanks to Amanda for the great find. Your Thoughts?
Kaj_Sotala summarizes fascinating ideas from Keith E. Stanovich’s What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought Cognitive science suggests that our brains use two different kinds of systems for reasoning: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is quick, dirty and parallel, and requires little energy. Type 2 is energy-consuming, slow and serial. Because [...]
…Richard Wade of Friendly Atheist, whose ”Ask Richard” column turns one fantastic year old today. It is a column by a retired therapist who gives atheists advice about atheistic parenting, the effects of one’s religious past on one’s present life and the way to go forward constructively in the future as an atheist, and, probably most [...]
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study this February revealed that less than one fifth of all American adults under 30 report regular church attendance. But they still also overwhelmingly claim belief in God. Tom Rees thinks that despite their beliefs, their abandonment of the pews may indicate that a multi-generational secularization [...]
Time ticks off some observed ways in which people have been shown to be susceptible to irrational subconscious influences: Studies have found that upon entering an office, people behave more competitively when they see a sharp leather briefcase on the desk, they talk more softly when there is a picture of a library on the [...]
Nicolai Sennels spent several years working with criminal Muslims in Copenhagen (where as of March 2009 “70% of the prison population in the Copenhagen youth prison consists of young man of Muslim heritage.”) He writes the following about the different ways that Westerners and Muslims view the locus of control: There is another strong difference between the [...]
In the paper “Predicting Persuasion-Induced Behavior Change from the Brain” from The Journal of Neuroscience , UCLA researchers reveal that they were better able to predict test subjects’ behavior days in advance by monitoring activity in the medial prefrontal cortex than by asking them what they would do. Psyorg.com explains: The new study by Lieberman [...]
Tushnet’s moral choice for herself and for other gays is celibacy or gender reassignment. Of course for some people, specifically some of the transgendered, a sex change is entirely appropriate and preferable to gay sex because from a gender(rather than a sex) perspective, those who are pre-op transgendered and are attracted to members of their [...]
In the New Yorker, Mike Huckabee recently used the phrase “ick factor” in describing responses to homosexuality and when attacked for it, claimed he was taking it from the LGBT movement and from the work of philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Huckabee’s self-defense comes from his website: The reaction over a reported quote from my most recent [...]
The story of an incredible, counter-intuitive, assumption-rattling, neurological situation and the ingenious way that Howard Engel learned to make the best of it: If you would rather watch a cartoon version of the above, that’s here. Your Thoughts?
I am a bit late on this story but wanted to offer a contrary viewpoint to the dominant one of the outraged blogosphere. Though I have never seen the show, I was interested in the controversy over the show Modern Family which apparently features a gay couple among its lead characters. The controversy centers not [...]
Last fall, Wired reported on a study published last fall (“Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity.” By Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Frank Krueger, Jordan Grafman. Public Library of Science ONE, Vol. 4 No. 9, September 28, 2009) which finds religious people have extra activity in the neurological brain regions indispensable for social intelligence: Brain scans [...]
Keep your eye on the ball: You Are Not So Smart has more on the phenomenon of Inattentional Blindness. Your Thoughts?
Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of [...]
In recent years, Jonathan Haidt has been influentially arguing that there are five essential modules in the mind from which human moral concerns originate. He has made this claim in several places, most prominently among philosophers in his contribution to Moral Psychology, Volume 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity (from Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s groundbreaking [...]
A study of 1,000 men and women ages 18-23, “Nonmarital Romantic Relationships and Mental Health in Early Adulthood” by Robin Simon and Anne Barrett, finds that young men benefit more from a romantic relationship going well and suffer worse from the strain of a bad one, whereas young women benefit more from simply being in [...]
A really interesting, but unfortunately unsurprising, study indicates that the same hormone that helps us bond with others, also makes us preemptively aggressive towards those outside that group with which we bond: Our findings show that oxytocin, a neuropeptide functioning as both a neurotransmitter and hormone, plays a critical role in driving in-group love and [...]
Now if only we could get her on the case of Michelle Bachmann. Your Thoughts?
Shermer does TED and explains how two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired traits, useful for survival, backfire on us: Your Thoughts?
Steven Pinker compares current worries that the internet is changing how we think and making it more superficial to previous “moral panics” at the arrival of all other new media, from the printing press to newspapers to television. (And his examples might as well have gone all the way back to Plato’s mistrust of the [...]
(via Atheist Nexus) Learn more about the topic and the film here. Your Thoughts?
Some interesting insights, but visually a blast to watch: <object width=”640″ height=”385″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/A3oIiH7BLmg&hl=en_US&fs=1&”></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/A3oIiH7BLmg&hl=en_US&fs=1&” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”640″ height=”385″></embed></object> Your Thoughts?
Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos (author of Parenting in Planned Lesbian Families (UvA Proefschriften) have the authored the first longitudinal study to track the outcomes of children created through artificial insemination through their teenage years. The results? The authors found that children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — [...]