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"World-changing theories and big breakthroughs are what every scientist yearns for. But the pressure to get results - and glory - means that feuds come thick and fast"

"It isn't often that a third of a movie audience sticks around to discuss its message, but that is the effect of "Race to Nowhere," a look at the downside of childhoods spent on résumé-building. " "How do you help your children balance when the whole education system is pushing, pushing, pushing, and you want your kids to be successful?" Alethea Lewis, a mother of two, asked a roomful of concerned parents who had just seen the film, a documentary, last week in Bronxville, N.Y., at a screening co-sponsored by the private Chapel School. With no advertising and little news media attention, "Race to Nowhere" has become a must-see movie in communities where the kindergarten-to-Harvard steeplechase is most competitive.

"A new study uses advanced brain-scanning technology to cast light on a topic that psychologists have puzzled over for more than half a century: social conformity. The study was based on a famous series of laboratory experiments from the 1950's by a social psychologist, Dr. Solomon Asch. In those early studies, the subjects were shown two cards. On the first was a vertical line. On the second were three lines, one of them the same length as that on the first card. Then the subjects were asked to say which two lines were alike, something that most 5-year-olds could answer correctly. But Dr. Asch added a twist. Seven other people, in cahoots with the researchers, also examined the lines and gave their answers before the subjects did. And sometimes these confederates intentionally gave the wrong answer. Dr. Asch was astonished at what happened next. After thinking hard, three out of four subjects agreed with the incorrect answers given by the confederates at least once. And one in four conformed 50 percent of the time. Dr. Asch, who died in 1996, always wondered about the findings. Did the people who gave in to group do so knowing that their answers was wrong? Or did the social pressure actually change their perceptions? "

"PSYCHOTHERAPY is having yet another identity crisis. It has manifested itself in two recent trends in the profession in America: the first involves trying to make therapy into more of a "hard science" by putting a new emphasis on measurable factors; the other is a growing belief among therapists that the standard practice of using talk therapy to discover traumas in a patient's past is not only unnecessary but can be injurious. That psychotherapists of various orientations find themselves under pressure to prove to themselves and to society that they are doing a hard-core science - which was a leading theme of the landmark Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference in California in December - is not really surprising. Given the prestige and trust the modern world gives to scientific standards, psychotherapists, who always have to measure themselves against the medical profession, are going to want to demonstrate that they, too, deal in the predictable; that they, too, can provide evidence for the value of what they do."

"Harvard evolutionary psychologist, Marc D. Hauser, argues that to understand what animals think and what they feel, we must ask about the kinds of selection pressures which shaped their minds and see the creature for what it is, no more, no less. Using the tools of evolutionary biology, linguistics, neuroscience, and cognitive science, he asks questions such as Why can't animals be taught to speak? How do animals find their way home in the dark? Do animals lie or feel guilty? Do they enjoy sex? Why were emotions designed into animal systems? Why are certain emotions universal and others highly specialized? "