Posts

June 15, 2012

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Today, I attended the first day of the inaugural conference of the Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN). It was a day full of the most amazing presentations, discussions, and meetings, all focused on topics related to work and family.

June 14, 2012

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8:50 PM | Do 'world religions' make cuckoldry easier?

You may have seen this one recently - perhaps under a headline such as How Religion Promotes Confidence About Paternity. It's an eye-catching headline, but that's not actually what the study showed - for a start, they didn't compare religious with non-religious people. Actually, what the data reveal is a more complex and rather more interesting picture. First, to summarize what was done. Beverly Strassman (University of Michigan) and colleagues have been studying the Dogon of Mali in West […]

June 09, 2012

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9:34 PM | Chistians find it harder than atheists to recognize their own faces

Christianity, many people would agree, encourages adherents to think less about themselves and more about their group of co-religionists. Yina Ma and Shihui Han, of Peking University in Beijing, China, wanted to know if these teachings actually had meaningful psychological effects. They recruited pairs of students: 10 pairs of atheists, and 10 pairs of Christians. All the pairs were matched for age and gender, and each pair of friends had known each other for at least two years during which […]

June 08, 2012

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1:08 PM | Attending the Inaugural meeting of the new Work and Family Researchers Network

Being a visiting scholar in New York has it's perks. Next week, I will be attending the Inaugural meeting of the new Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN). Join me if you can!

June 05, 2012

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7:55 PM | Press Release: Maternity and parental leave ensure better employment rates for mothers

My university just released a press release regarding my new publication in the Journal of Marriage and Family. The original release can be found on their website.

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5:05 AM | In the US, belief in life after death is linked to belief in a just world and lower anxiety

Religion and afterlife beliefs are pretty tightly bound together, and there are several ideas why that might be. One is that belief in an afterlife might make help people to be more relaxed about threats and adversity in the here-and-now. Kevin Flannelly, at the Spears Research Institute in New York, and colleagues assessed data from the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey to see whether belief in the afterlife was linked to different world views. He found that positive beliefs about the afterlife […]

May 31, 2012

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8:54 PM | Religion boosts self control

Kevin Rounding (Queen's University, Ontario, Canada) has run a series of experiments which suggest that religious beliefs can actually boost your ability to stay focussed and resist temptation. For example, they found that students primed with religious thoughts were able to drink more cups of a disgusting orange juice/vinegar blend (they were offered 5c for every 25 mL they drank). Religiously primed students were also more likely to put off receiving a reward of $5 now, in order to receive […]

May 30, 2012

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10:08 AM | From pothead to POTUS

As you may have seen everywhere else on the internet a new biography of Barack Obama calls him out for his days as high school stoner. Not only was a heavy user but he had a habit of intercepting joints … Continue reading →

May 26, 2012

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9:01 PM | Repetitious magic ritual are thought to be more effective

Magical rituals - routines designed to bring about a real-world effect, like curing disease or cursing a rival - have been part of human society since as far back as anyone can tell. So, as a species, we've had plenty of time to sort out what works and what doesn't. But the question is, do people have a gut feeling for what makes a good ritual? To find out, Cristine Legare (University of Texas at Austin) headed to the city of Belo Horizonte, located in the south-eastern region of Brazil. […]

May 25, 2012

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7:27 PM | Women’s Employment: Institutions and Demographics

Women's employment increased dramatically during recent decades. Nevertheless, women's employment falls behind that of men. One key explanation for that discrepancy is that mothers are less likely to be employed than women without children. In a recent publication in the Journal of Marriage and Family, it was shown that government policies can have a substantial impact on the degree to which women combine motherhood with employment.

Nieuwenhuis, Rense, Need, Ariana & Van der Kolk, Henk (2012). Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment in 18 OECD Countries, 1975 – 1999, Journal of Marriage and Family, 74 (3) 614-630. Other: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2012.00965.x

Citation

May 21, 2012

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9:08 PM | For less-religious Americans, compassion is a significant factor in prosocial behaviour

Apologies if you saw this one when it came out last month, but it's an interesting study that really deserves a closer look! Laura Saslow (University of California at San Francisco) and colleagues wanted to know whether compassion influenced the prosocial tendencies (altruism, generosity, trust etc) of the religious and non religious. So they ran three different studies - different groups of people, and different tests. In the first, they found that across the USA (looking at data from the […]

May 18, 2012

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3:54 PM | YourBrain is going Nowhere

The Nowhere festival takes place in Spain from 3rd to 8th July. I’m going and maybe you should come too. It is in the middle of a desert and it’s a festival made by it’s attendees. If you’ve heard of Burning … Continue reading →

May 16, 2012

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9:15 PM | Distrust of atheists is reduced if people have confidence in law and order

If you read this blog regularly, you'll have come across work by Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Previously, they've shown that atheists in North America are are disliked because they are distrusted, and that untrustworthy people are often assumed to be atheists. Why the distrust? Well, it's partly because they are an unknown quantity - many Americans never come across an open atheists - but also partly because people who think they are being […]

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3:58 PM | The surprising effectiveness of medical marijuana

The other highly surprising thing I learnt at the recent SSDP UK conference was just how amazingly effective cannabis is as a medicine. Obviously, I knew that marijuana was available as ‘medicine’ in some countries and US states. But I largely … Continue reading →

May 13, 2012

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8:59 PM | Jesus shares your political views - but is more extreme

Lee Ross, a Psychologist at Stanford University in California, and colleagues have polled over 1,200 Americans about their political views, and also what opinions they thought Jesus held. Unsurprisingly, liberals thought jesus was generally a pretty liberal guy, while conservatives thought he was rather conservative. How can this be, when they read the same Bible? Well in fact, liberals did think that Jesus was a shade more conservative than they were, and the conservatives did think he […]

May 08, 2012

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9:32 PM | Non-religious more likely to donate their bodies to science and organs to other people

Here's a simple, but compelling study. Jon Cornwall (University of Otago, New Zealand) and colleagues from Ireland and South Africa surveyed 200 people who had registered to donate their body to science in those three countries. They found that body donors mostly (80%) cited a desire to aid medical science as the main reason for wishing to donate their body. They tended to be older (over 60), and to have been in long-term partnerships (either currently or previously). They were also more [...]

May 04, 2012

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9:02 PM | International religion league tables - who's up, who's down? And why.

You may have seen the recent splurge of news stories about how religious different countries are. Depending on where you looked, you may have come away thinking either that belief is in decline worldwide, that Catholic countries are the most religious, or even (and this one is quite bizarre) that people get more religious as they get older. Unless you were reading carefully, you may not even have realised they were talking about the same report! In fact, the report (which you can read yourself [...]

April 30, 2012

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9:02 PM | Bad fonts decrease belief in God

So, do you believe in God? OK, well how about if I ask it like this: Do you believe in God? Surprisingly, according to a new study by Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia in Columbia,simply changing the font used to write the questions (to make them more difficult to read) can actually make you more likely to answer 'No'. The explanation, they think, is that when the text is hard to read, we have to concentrate harder. We step our analytical brain up a gear, [...]

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8:20 AM | Drugs Quote #021 – HHGttG on alcohol

‘The Encyclopedia Galactica’ describes alcohol as a colourless, volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms. ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ also mentions alcohol. It says that the … Continue reading →

April 29, 2012

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3:15 PM | Imaging the brain on psychedelics – Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris

Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris is one of the first researchers in 40 years to be allowed to investigate the effects of psychedelic drugs. He used a FMI brain imager to study the resting state activation in the brains of volunteers how … Continue reading →

April 28, 2012

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8:41 PM | Are secular alternatives to religious gatherings any good?

It's often suggested that religion benefits people by bringing them together and helping to create and bind communities. Since most humans are highly social, having a mechanism to strengthen social groups could be expected to have psychological and even health benefits. Indeed, this have often been shown to be the case. People who go to church more often seem to be happier on average, and any health benefits of religion are related to church going, rather than religious beliefs. Now, there [...]

April 25, 2012

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12:40 PM | Quantified Self & Boozerlyer in the Economist

The Economist has a nice article about the Quantified Self movement and their recent conference in Amsterdam. The Boozerlyzer gets a passing mention. THE idea of measuring things to chart progress towards a goal is commonplace in large organisations. Governments … Continue reading →

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12:30 PM | Beware the Bromo-Dragonfly

One interesting new thing I learnt at the SSDP-UK annual conference this weekend is that Bromo-Dragonfly is extremely dangerous. Bromo-Dragonfly is a very highly potent psychedelic, so called because of the shape of its molecule. It is one of the … Continue reading →

April 24, 2012

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2:00 PM | Instinctive thinkers more likely to believe in a personal god – and less likely to be atheists

Late last year some fascinating research revealed that people who take a more deliberative approach to problem solving – rather than just going with their instincts – are also less religious. Now some independent research not only confirms those findings, but also extends them to show how there is a progressive link thinking style and decreasing religious beliefs. Gordon Pennycook, at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, ran the test on 267 people from around the world (mostly [...]

April 23, 2012

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12:25 PM | Boozerlyzer beta!

It has taken a while but our first beta version is finally available. Beta Version 40 Speed & reliability improved. Can now edit and delete drinks. New data plots - drinks per session or over last week - scatter plots … Continue reading →

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10:04 AM | Drugs Quote #020 – William Shakespeare

Since today is Shakespeare’s [approx birthday] and death-day, here he is explaining alcohol. MACDUFF Was it so late, friend, ere you went to bed, That you do lie so late? Porter ‘Faith sir, we were carousing till the second cock; … Continue reading →

April 20, 2012

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8:38 PM | Religion facilitates learning about omniscience – but it still has to be learned

Recently, the New Scientist published a special ‘God’ issue(behind pay wall) arguing that religion is natural and beneficial to society. All very interesting, but several of the articles gave quite a one-sided view of several issues (properly speaking, they were opinion pieces written by leading scientists advocating their particular view point). Take, for example, the article by Justin Barrett, arguing that children have an innate understanding of omniscience. That’s an important [...]

April 17, 2012

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6:18 AM | How fear and anxiety leads to more religion - a presentation

On Saturday I gave a presentation in Bournemouth to the Dorset Humanists, on the topic 'Fear and God'. In the talk I review many of the studies I've covered on this blog, looking at how and why fear and anxiety provoke religious responses, and the link between unstable and dangerous societies with greater levels of religion. I also look at some of the consequences of the anxiolytic effects of religion on behaviour. The talk is aimed at a general, non-scientific audience (although it does cover [...]

April 12, 2012

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9:51 PM | Religious people believe in a just world

Believers in a just world think that things happen for a reason. In particular, they are more likely than other people to think that victims of crime are in some way responsible for what happened to them, that the poor are poor because of their own actions, and that sick people have done something to cause their illnesses. You might expect that people who believe in an omnipotent, purpose-giving god might might also be 'just world' believers, but in fact there is not a lot of hard evidence. [...]

April 10, 2012

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8:40 AM | Boozerlyzer won’t be at TED 2013

A few weeks a go I sent in a very short audition video for TED 2013. I didn’t get in which is probably just as well because I’d have been terrified. But I thought you might like to see it. … Continue reading →