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"How do we tell the difference between real threats and bogus ones? (This is important for many reasons; for one, chasing fake threats takes away resources from real issues.) But it's tough to do, since evolution has given us a brain with what scientists call a "negativity bias" that makes it prone to feeling threatened. This bias developed because the ancient mammals, primates, and early humans that were all mellow and fearless did not notice the shadow overhead or slither nearby that CHOMP! killed them. The ones that survived to pass on their genes were nervous and cranky, and we are their great-grandchildren, sitting atop the food chain, armed with nuclear weapons. Your brain is continually looking for bad news. As soon as it finds some, it fixates on it with tunnel vision, fast-tracks it into memory storage, and then reactivates it at the least hint of anything even vaguely similar. But good news gets a kind of neural shrug: "uh, whatever." In effect, the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. All this makes human beings super-sensitive to apparent threats. Basically, in evolution, there are two kinds of mistakes: (1) You think there is a tiger in the bushes but there isn't one, and (2) You think the coast is clear, no tiger in the bushes, but there really is one about to pounce. These mistakes have very different consequences. The first one will make you anxious, but the second one will kill you. That's why Mother Nature wants you to make the first mistake a thousand times over in order to avoid making the second mistake even once. This hard-wired tendency toward fear affects individuals, groups (from couples to multinational corporations), and nations. It makes them overestimate threats, underestimate opportunities, and underestimate resources. "

"Earlier this year, AC360°, with the help of a seasoned team of researchers, conducted a pilot study based on the 1940's doll test. In this pilot study, more than 130 kids were asked a series of questions about five cartoon dolls with varying skin tones. Half of the children were African-American and half were white, half were in the north and half in the south. The results were surprising: white children have an overwhelming white bias, and black children also have a bias toward white. "

Where does racism come from...nature or nurture?

"Fans who angrily questioned several calls made by soccer referees in this year's World Cup won't be surprised at a report in the journal PLoS One that found inherent bias in referees. They might, however, be surprised that the bias is perceptual. The study found that soccer experts whose languages read left to right call more fouls when the action moves in the opposite direction, or right to left. "We are used to moving our eyes left to right so we have a preference for viewing events left to right," said Alexander Kranjec, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and the study's lead author. "

"A good portion of 21st-century news consumers no longer believe in objectivity. They know it isn't possible. And yet the public expects reporters to always play it down the middle, delivering the facts and only the facts, unencumbered by bias. But to what lengths should reporters go? Can they report fairly on beats that encroach on their personal lives? Should they vote? Brooke canvassed an array of (objective) sources and compiled this report."

"Here's a little ditty that catalogs and musically explains a useful list of cognitive biases uncovered by behavioral psychologists. It was created by Bradley Wray, a high school teacher in Maryland, as a study aid for students preparing for their AP Psychology exam. How are you biased? Let Bradley Wray count the ways."

I think I've linked this one already, but it's good enough to list twice!

"It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three. "This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity," Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a "tribal-moral community" united by "sacred values" that hinder research and damage their credibility - and blind them to the hostile climate they've created for non-liberals. "Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation," said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. "But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations." "

Texas is reissuing US History textbooks this year with a lot of controversial additions and deletions.

Texas textbooks influence the entire US History curriculum around the country. What do you think the effect of Texas' changes will be to history as American students understand it?

Some Texas Board of Education members want to prohibit what they see as an anti-Christian treatment of history.

"Sixty years ago, Allied forces brought an end to Adolf Hitler's dream that Germany would rule Europe and dominate the world. The death of Nazi Germany gave birth to a charge that still haunts the scientific community--what might be called "the Nazi analogy." In ethical or policy disputes about science and medicine, no argument can bring debate to a more screeching halt then the invocation of the Nazi comparison. Whether the subject is stem cell research, end-of-life care, the conduct of clinical trials in poor nations, abortion, embryo research, animal experimentation, genetic testing, or human experimentation involving vulnerable populations, references to Nazi policies or practices tumble forth from critics. "If X is done, then we are on the road to Nazi Germany" has become a commonplace claim in contemporary bioethical debates. Sadly, too often those who draw an analogy between current behavior and what the Nazis did do not know what they are talking about. The Nazi analogy is equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb in ethical battles about science and medicine. Because its misuse diminishes the horror done by Nazi scientists and doctors to their victims, it is ethically incumbent upon those who invoke the Nazi analogy to understand what they are claiming."

"Every day, hundreds of thousands of scholars study human behavior. Every day, a few of their studies are bundled and distributed via e-mail by Kevin Lewis, who covers the social sciences for The Boston Globe and National Affairs. And every day, I file away these studies because I find them bizarrely interesting. "

"The behavioral revolution in economics and psychology has successfully identified and named close to three dozen biases (my favorite behavioral folk song defines them in verse). I had thought that these biases transcended issues of culture. Indeed, both neoclassical and behavioral economists were united in a belief that cultural variables were of secondary importance when it came to the deep drivers of behavior. But a series of experiments now has me thinking that the underlying heuristics are less universal."

"Seinfeld ran for nine seasons on NBC and became famous as a "show about nothing." Basically, the show allows viewers to follow the antics of Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer as they move through their daily lives, often encountering interesting people or dealing with special circumstances. It is the simplicity of Seinfeld that makes it so appropriate for use in economics courses. Using these clips (as well as clips from other television shows or movies) makes economic concepts come alive, making them more real for students. Ultimately, students will start seeing economics everywhere - in other TV shows, in popular music, and most importantly, in their own lives."

"When you take a sip of Cabernet, what are you tasting? The grape? The tannins? The oak barrel? Or the price? Believe it or not, the most dominant flavor may be the dollars. Thanks to the work of some intrepid and wine-obsessed economists (yes, there is an American Association of Wine Economists), we are starting to gain a new understanding of the relationship between wine, critics and consumers."

Thanks to Felix (TAS2010) for passing this one on!

"UPDATE: Fox News senior vice president for news Michael Clemente has responded to the study which found that his network's viewers are more misinformed about American political issues than any other channel. In a statement to the New York Times' Brian Stelter, Clemente disparaged the University of Maryland, where the study was done. "The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having 'Students Who Study The Least' and being the 'Best Party School' - given these fine academic distinctions, we'll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was 'researched' with," Clemente said."

The Fox News VP responds to the study of FoxNews viewers misinformation status by making a textbook ad hominem on the university making the study, University of Maryland.

"In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts. The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds-fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself."

"As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy. "