Category: Psychology
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Mark D. White The Economist published a short note recently summarizing the results of a forthcoming paper in Cognition that reports that experiment participants "who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher scores on measures of Psychopathy, machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness" (from the paper abstract). The experimenters presented subjects with variants of trolley dilemmas–either…
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My Green Lantern and Philosophy co-editor Jane Dryden and I have a blog post at my Psychology Today blog about what the Green Lantern Corps can teach us about cooperation and tolerance, especially in light of conflicts over values. Check it out! UPDATE: The Globe and the Mail also picked up the piece, under a…
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Mark D. White Last night I read a wonderful and concise article by Jillian Craigie (King's College London) from the latest issue of Bioethics (25/6, July 2011) titled "Competence, Practical Rationality and What a Patient Values." The abstract follows: According to the principle of patient autonomy, patients have the right to be self-determining in decisions…
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Mark D. White Just read a very interesting article from The New Republic by Jamie Holmes titled "Why Can't More Poor People Escape Poverty?", detailing new work on the intersection of psychological studies of ego depletion and self-management–the work by Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, and others that I've cited widely in my own work on willpower–and…
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Just a heads up – my friend Dr. Robin Rosenberg gives her unique perspective on X-Men: First Class on her blog at Psychology Today – check it out. (Can't comment myself–saw Kung Fu Panda 2 with my daughter instead–closest thing to an Immortal Iron Fist movie we'll see for a while, and a really good…
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Mark D. White Barry Schwartz (author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less), Yakov Ben-Haim, and Cliff Dasco have a paper in the latest issue of Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (41/2, June 2011) titled "What Makes a Good Decision? Robust Satisficing as a Normative Standard of Rational Decision Making," in…
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Newsarama has a feature article on a session at the Comics Arts Conference which took place "within" WonderCon this year. Titled "Life After Trauma: To Be A Superhero Or Supervillain," the session featured my good friend Dr. Robin Rosenberg (editor of The Psychology of Superheroes), as well as Dr. Travis Langely and Andrea Letamendi. From the…
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Mark D. White The new issue of Behavioral and Brian Sciences (34/2, 2011) focuses on the nature of the evolutionary advantages of reasoning; the target article, by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, is titled "Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory": Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better…
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This post, which I had intended to write since Daredevil: Reborn #3 came out last Wednesday, was inspired by recent comments on one of my posts on self-loathing at Psychology Today, and also serves as a companion piece to my post on Green Arrow from earlier this year. I really doubt revelations of tortured self-loathing on…
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Mark D. White Carl Bialik at The Wall Street Journal has an article in today's edition and a blog post from last night, both very evenhanded, about the attempts by governments to measure the happiness of its citizenry, and the skepticism of some regarding the efficacy of this. For a critical look at the theory behind happiness studies,…
Mark D. White 