Group items tagged

About 300 people have been arrested in the Indian state of Bihar, authorities say, after reports emerged of blatant cheating in school exams. Parents and friends of students were photographed climbing school walls to pass on answers. Many of those arrested were parents. At least 750 students have been expelled. An estimated 1.4m students are taking their school leaving exams in Bihar alone - tests seen as crucial for their chances of a successful career. The authorities have clearly been embarrassed by the cheating, the BBC's Jill McGivering says, with the episode prompting ridicule on social media.

Teachers have complained about "cheating watches" being sold online to give students an unfair advantage in exams.These digital watches include an "emergency button" to quickly switch from hidden text to a clock face.The watches hold data or written information which can be read in exams.But a deputy head from Bath has warned about the scale of this "hidden market" and says it could tempt stressed students into cheating.

We are predisposed to cooperate with each other, because living in groups gave us substantial long-term survival advantage. But we are also born cheaters, because cheating in the right circumstances gave us a short-term survival advantage. As these two conflicting tendencies tugged for our souls, we simultaneously evolved punishment behaviors—a way to dampen cheating by increasing the short-term costs to the cheater. But our punishment instincts are infected with the same conflict—our brains have been built to punish cheaters, but that punishment urge is intrinsically restrained, in no small part because we all know that we, too, are cheaters.

Henrich’s work with the ultimatum game was an example of a small but growing countertrend in the social sciences, one in which researchers look straight at the question of how deeply culture shapes human cognition. His new colleagues in the psychology department, Heine and Norenzayan, were also part of this trend. Heine focused on the different ways people in Western and Eastern cultures perceived the world, reasoned, and understood themselves in relationship to others. Norenzayan’s research focused on the ways religious belief influenced bonding and behavior. The three began to compile examples of cross-cultural research that, like Henrich’s work with the Machiguenga, challenged long-held assumptions of human psychological universality.

As Heine, Norenzayan, and Henrich furthered their search, they began to find research suggesting wide cultural differences almost everywhere they looked: in spatial reasoning, the way we infer the motivations of others, categorization, moral reasoning, the boundaries between the self and others, and other arenas. These differences, they believed, were not genetic. The distinct ways Americans and Machiguengans played the ultimatum game, for instance, wasn’t because they had differently evolved brains. Rather, Americans, without fully realizing it, were manifesting a psychological tendency shared with people in other industrialized countries that had been refined and handed down through thousands of generations in ever more complex market economies. When people are constantly doing business with strangers, it helps when they have the desire to go out of their way (with a lawsuit, a call to the Better Business Bureau, or a bad Yelp review) when they feel cheated. Because Machiguengan culture had a different history, their gut feeling about what was fair was distinctly their own. In the small-scale societies with a strong culture of gift-giving, yet another conception of fairness prevailed. There, generous financial offers were turned down because people’s minds had been shaped by a cultural norm that taught them that the acceptance of generous gifts brought burdensome obligations. Our economies hadn’t been shaped by our sense of fairness; it was the other way around.

Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world. While studying children from the U.S., researchers have suggested a developmental timeline for what is called “folkbiological reasoning.” These studies posit that it is not until children are around 7 years old that they stop projecting human qualities onto animals and begin to understand that humans are one animal among many. Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.

Eleven former school teachers have been convicted for their involvement in a scheme to falsify student test scores.They changed wrong answers to demonstrate student progress, and some received performance-related bonuses.

From primary school to university, I witnessed countless such public humiliations: for fighting, cheating or petty misdemeanors. Caught committing any of these offenses and you may have to stand before the student body, criticizing your own “moral flaws,” condemning your character defects, showing yourself no mercy, even exaggerating your faults. Only those who have endured it can know the depth of shame one feels.

And, the basic unit of taxonomy – ‘the species’ – remains an elusive and controversial concept despite its fundamental importance to science. Yet, few people outside of biology and philosophy realise that ‘the species’ has been at the centre of a major controversy in science for much of the last 50 years.

Taxonomy is a fundamental or ‘enabling’ science that underpins all of biology and its many related fields including medical research.

• How does the species category compare with other scientific groups or types of things like say the chemical elements? • Does it play the same kind of role in science – conveying the same sorts of information and allowing us to make predictions about nature? • What’s the best, most objective, way to recognise a species?