Believing we have no free will leads to less moral behavior

Well, facilitated cheating on some arithmetic problems for a psych test, but just extrapolate...

For some kids, genes ruling behavior

After years of ignoring those children [environmentally resistant outliers], a few scientists now realize that they are telling us something that promises to revolutionize our understanding of child development. In an echo of "personalized medicine" (matching drugs to people's DNA), scientists are finding that how parents treat their children is filtered through the prism of DNA. Parents may intuit that, as they notice that what worked with one child is failing abysmally with another, but now science is pinpointing exactly what combinations of nature and nurture spell gridlock. It is finally dawning on experts that "individual genetic differences are the 800-pound gorilla of child development," says Jack Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. "The promise of genomics is that you will be able to tailor experiences as we tailor drugs."

Marks of a con willing to overlook inconsistencies

Once trust has been established:

Indeed, what's notable from the facts that have emerged about Gerhartsreiter [in implying a Rockefeller lineage] is how much he was able to get away with despite playing his roles, in certain ways, rather poorly. People who knew him in his various incarnations have remarked on how his perpetually unwashed clothes and junky cars didn't match up with the story he told about himself. He struck others as plainly ignorant about mores and business matters that someone of his background would know, and he seemed at times to go out of his way to antagonize co-workers and neighbors.

Political psychology -- denying a certain group a rise in relative status

Some on the right wing will stress "individual responsibility" as a value when it lowers the status of the whiners (why whine when it was the victim's own fault?). Some on the left wing will stress "individual responsibility" when it is time to punish corporate wrongdoers and thus lower their status. Not everyone applies (or rejects) this value consistently.

Given this difference in rhetoric, the right wing will be identified with the monied class, even when the left often has more money. And the left wing will be identified as the whiners, even though the right at times whines as much or more. You might say that both sides are monied, high human capital whiners, on the whole. And if you compare them to Burmese rice farmers, the two sides seem somewhat alike.

Kevin Mitnick on social engineering for hacking

Did five years:

Dubbed the "most dangerous hacker in the world," Mitnick was put in solitary confinement and prevented from using a phone after law enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone, he said.
Mitnick didn't do any whistling on Saturday, but in his keynote following the panel he talked about how he listened in on FBI phone calls during the three years he evaded the FBI, left them doughnuts when he narrowly escaped raids and was chased down by a helicopter. He also demonstrated how to be able to see the phone numbers of callers on caller ID even when they have their number set to be blocked.

Former FBI agent Joe Navarro goes over body language

A slideshow of many examples with audio.

Plausibility effect -- sounding authoritative enough for academia

They slipped Dr Fox on to the programme at an academic conference on medical education. His audience was made up of doctors, healthcare workers, and academics. The title of his lecture was Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education. Dr Fox filled his lecture and his question and answer session with double talk, jargon, dubious neologisms, non sequiturs, and mutually contradictory statements. This was interspersed with elaborate diversions into parenthetical humour and “meaningless references to unrelated topics”. It’s the kind of education you pay good money for in the UK.

The lecture went down well. At the end, a questionnaire was distributed and every person in the audience gave significantly more favourable than unfavourable feedback. The comments were gushing, and yet thoughtful: “excellent presentation, enjoyed listening”, “good flow, seems enthusiastic”, and “too intellectual a presentation, my orientation is more pragmatic”.

We are all moral hypocrites

Two tasks:

One was described as tedious and time-consuming; the other, easy and brief. The subjects were asked to assign each task to either themselves or the next participant. They could do this independently or defer to a computer, which would assign the tasks randomly.

Eighty-five percent of 42 subjects passed up the computer’s objectivity and assigned themselves the short task – leaving the laborious one to someone else. Furthermore, they thought their decision was fair. However, when 43 other subjects watched strangers make the same decision, they thought it unjust.

The researchers then "constrained cognition" by asking subjects to memorize long strings of numbers. In this greatly distracted state, subjects became impartial. They thought their own transgressions were just as terrible as those of others.

False, constructed memories

Just an anecdote with pleasant animation showing how imperfect the human brain is.

Deprogramming with meditation

Some meditative practices purport to reverse automatization of thought and behavior, such as transcendental or mindfulness meditation, and indeed there is some evidence that these techniques can reduce interference on the Stroop task.

Some good news for hypnosis too.

How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made?

... the field of psychology began making important and cumulative progress when it ceased to be a social science, and became a natural science. Psychology is really a branch of biology or zoology [evolutionary psychology, behavior genetics, and cognitive neuroscience].

Harsh discipline makes aggressive children worse

Crucially, unlike aggressive parenting, the greater use of calmer reasoning techniques for disciplining children was not associated with a subsequent increase in the children's aggression (although it didn't reduce aggression either).

Neurochemistry of fairness

The new research shows that, despite the apparent significance of this behavior, it's remarkably easy to manipulate responses to the UG by tweaking brain chemistry. The authors of this study recruited volunteers that ingested a drink that was either a placebo, or one that would produce a short-term drop in the neurotransmitter serotonin. Five hours later, when serotonin levels should be stably depleted, the subjects with reduced serotonin rejected unfair offers at significantly higher rates than the placebo population. No difference in behavior was detected in offers that are typically viewed as fair.

What dictionaries and optical illusions say about our brains

Mark Changizi is bent on determining why it works that way... [He] has demonstrated that the shapes of letters in 100 writing systems reflect common ones seen in nature: Take the letter "A"—it looks like a mountain, he says. And "Y" might remind one of a tree with branches. He also showed that across different languages most characters take three strokes to write out. That's because, he says, three is the highest quantity a person's brain can perceive without resorting to counting.

Pixar's Brad Bird on fostering innovation

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

Famous failures

Memory distortion and reality

[Daniel Schacter] divides the “sins” into the following categories: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. The “sins” of transience, absent-mindedness, and blocking are memory malfunctions that fall in to the class of omission—failure to bring to mind a desired fact, event, or idea. The remaining sins represent malfunctions in which some form of memory is present, but is either incorrect or unwanted.

Establishing new habits and breaking bad ones

“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”

Breaking unhealthy ones here.

Behavioral genetics has some precision

Freud’s view of personality was passionate, controversial, sexy, unfalsifiable and wrong. But it was a personal theory of personality. Anyone could immediately apply it, party-game style, to his or her own unconscious motivations, hidden fantasies and terrible parents. The behavioural-genetics view of personality is calm, uncontroversial (except to a few diehard Freudians), empirically testable and correct. But it is an impersonal theory of personality.

Busting some myths about mind

Like the 10% brain use thing.