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Written by Andreas Kappes

The school year just started, but surprisingly, the half-term break is already lurking around the corner, when children have a week off. For a lot of parents this implies seeing their own parents, having them take care of the kids. And whenever families come together, there will be many sentences starting with: If I were you… Adult children don’t hesitate to give unsolicited advice on, for instance, the outfit choices of their partners (“If I were you I would only wear this at midnight, when it is dark and nobody can see you”), parents give advice to their own parents (“If I were you, I would take it slow), and grandparents can’t resist either (“If I were you, I would buy a house and stop renting”). Even outside the family, unsolicited advice is everywhere¹. Obama telling the United Kingdom how much money to spend on the military, David Cameron advising Europe on how to handle immigration, or this blog post suggesting ways to offer advice; it is readily available. And all of these different forms of advice – hopefully with one obvious exception – have one thing in common; they backfire. While people love to dish out advice and it seems to them to be a good idea, we are not great in taking it; we rather hate it. So how to give it right?

Read More »If I were you then I wouldn’t say that: The perils of giving and taking advice

A few days ago, Kim Davis was released from jail, where she had spent the past few days. Davis, as you probably recall, is the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed for her refusal to issue marriage licenses to gay couples (more technically, for contempt for refusing to obey an order to grant such licenses). Davis says that doing so is inconsistent with her Christian beliefs. Let’s assume (rightly, I am very confident) that Davis’s belief that single sex marriage is morally objectionable is wrong. Is there nevertheless something admirable about her behaviour?[1]

Read More »The Virtuous Homophobe

Written by Andreas Kappes

A couple of years ago, my mother flew in from Germany to visit and help us with looking after my daughter during a school break. One night, I can’t remember the exact circumstances, she angrily told me: “Stop being so polite”. I might have thanked her for something that in her mind, obviously, did not deserve a “thank you”. My mother embodies some of the stereotypical ideas about Germans. She prefers directness over politeness and avoids the unnecessary expression of feelings. Yet, weirdly, her remark rang true to me. I felt guilty of being too polite and I understood the sentiment without being able to verbalize to my wife – who is American – later that evening why my politeness was offending my mother. But how impolite should I be?

Read More »Post-Vacation Musings: How rude should I be to my mother?

Joseph Bowen (@joe_bowen_1)

Lets begin with a pair of cases:

Pub Swap. Suppose Ann endorses Political Party A and Ben endorses Political Party B. Both would place Party C as their last choice. Ann lives in constituency 1 and Ben lives in constituency 2. In constituency 1 there is a close race between Party B and Party C. In constituency 2 there is a close race between Party A and Party C. Sitting in the pub the night before the election, Ann and Ben decide to vote for each others respective parties in their own constituency.

Votes for Beer. Suppose Carl endorses Political Party A and Dana endorses Political Party B. Carl lives in constituency 3 and Dana lives in constituency 4. In constituency 3, Party A is certain to win. In constituency 4, there is a close race between Party A and Party C—Party B cannot win. Sitting in the pub the night before the election, Carl offers to buy Dana five pints in exchange for her voting for Party A.

Is there a difference between Pub Swap and Votes for Beer? Read More »Vote Selling Versus Vote Swapping

There has been a lot of concern expressed about the role that social media might play in political polarization. The worry is that social media users might only expose themselves to news stories with which they agree and have friends that reinforce their own views, and thereby become more extreme in their views and less understanding or tolerant of those who disagree with them. A recent paper seems to show that the phenomenon is real, but less extreme than we might have thought; at least among those people who identify their political orientation. This group is likely to be more politically aware than other users and may be thought to be more extreme in their exposure to self-reinforcing stories. On average, this group had about 23% of friends with an opposing political viewpoint, and about 29% of the stories they read presented views that were opposed to theirs.Read More »Facebook and political polarization.

@JimACEverett

 www.jimaceverett.com

As many readers of this blog may know, in the last few years a “replication crisis” has caused intense soul searching in psychology – and particularly in social psychology. This crisis was sparked when several widely cited findings in psychology subsequently failed to replicate when tested by independent researchers (for some background see Earp and Trafimow’s paper here). This is – of course – a substantial problem because it severely limits the confidence we can have in psychological findings. For social psychological research this problem may be even graver, given that many of the topics studied – e.g. attitudes, prejudice, political voting – have direct implications for policy making. If we cannot have confidence in our findings, social psychology is in very hot water indeed.

Read More »Could PhD students solve the replication crisis in psychology?

Pandas are notoriously picky eaters: they only eat bamboo. But a recent study has found that pandas are actually poorly adapted for their diet. Pandas apparently evolved from omnivorous bears. Whether as a consequence of a decrease in the availability of prey or an increase in bamboo, however, they shifted to an exclusively vegetarian diet about two million years ago. But they did not evolve the kind of digestive apparatus usually seen in herbivores. They have a carnivore’s digestive system, and they lack the gut flora required for extracting the maximum amount of energy from plant-based sources. Hence, perhaps, the fact that they spend so much of their time eating.Read More »Pandas, Humans, and Evolution: What is the state of nature?