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Dunning and Kruger also received the 2000 IgNobel award for their psychology paper "Unskilled and Unaware of It".
 

Optimists are also more likely to die young, and as a result of their own negligence.

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2013/02/pessimism-future.aspx

On a related note, it's been shown again and again that you can't really do more than one higher-level brain task at once. So even the people that are very very good at switching rapidly between operating a cell phone and driving are still not really doing both at the same time.

So they aren't actually performing the task of driving while they are preoccupied with their cell phone. They may as well be asleep during those periods.

And here is where the pot stats calling the kettle black. You're projecting your particular approach across others.

Completely different situation. Had the other poster said there existed people who believed what he was saying, I'd have had to agree. But he didn't, he imputed those beliefs to me, specifically.

Where is this clear human need to believe in something? Because every culture has had it's God or Gods?

Among other things.

I'm not an anthropologist or a psychologist, so I'm not really equipped to explain it in detail, but ask one. Or do some searches. My first search got this top hit: http://www.apa.org/monitor/201.... I'm sure with a little more effort you could find the studies that appear to demonstrate that the need to believe is pretty deeply wired into our basic cognitive structure.

Give it a couple hundred more years and religion will be a thing of past.

If cognitive psychologists have it right, that's not true. Unless we find something else to replace it. I offered (at length) a possible option in another post on this story: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

I've made a feminist robot.

Meanwhile back in the real world men are sexually assaulted and raped by women just as often. Rape culture my arse.

Riddle me this - if women are somehow, somewhere being paid less for doing the same job, having the same experience and qualifications as men, why wouldn't employers hire the cheaper employee? I mean did you perhaps miss the whole outsourcing thing? They aren't moving operations wholesale to Shanghai for the local cuisine.

Which leads us to the next question, which is - what sort of mind is unable to take the minimal critical steps internally not to ask these sorts of questions immediately?

Sexual abuse, really: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journa...

And that doesn't even factor in the whole US prison thing.

Healthcare, female specific health issues garner between two and twelve times as much funding as male, and even then the feminists complain about movember.

And we can talk about lifespan disparities, the enormous suicide disparities, jail sentencing disparities, numbers enrolling and graduating from third level institutions disparities, inequality of outcome in the family courts (see what I did there?), VAWA laws that have resulted in female child abusers actually getting child support from their underaged victims, disparities in the numbers of homeless, and so on and on and on.

Although I do like the way you rounded it off with a fairly elderly shaming tactic. Vintage.

There's a "skills gap" present in Math aptitude tests that appears in countries where the status of women is worse. There are countries where the gap is lower or even reversed -- which seems to suggest culture rather than biology.

If you can find an alternative explanation beyond "American Culture", feel free to suggest it.

Hereditary=genetics? What kind of a gross over-simplification is that? "Like in Humans, Genes Drive Half of Chimp Intelligence"? Genes don't drive human intelligence. They determine the upper and lower limits that can be achieved with proper nutrition, care and education and a multitude of other factors. More and more factors are being discovered everyday, each diminishing the role of genetics.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content...
http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb...

I don't buy that my children and I are simply genetically superior to nearly the entire human population. You can try to convince me otherwise, but it seems more likely an industry group with an interest in making a false claim is spreading a myth than it is that my children and I are really that far about the rest of the human race on the evolutionary scale.

You sound awfully conspiratorial.

I guess this is an example of the articles you don't like. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinf...

I haven't met your children and I don't know if they could read at the age of three, or merely recognize words on flash cards. It certainly would be very impressive if they could read a book at the first grade level. But I'd need more than your own self-report.

Teachers say that all childhood skills have developmental stages, and if you try to teach a kid to learn something before he's at the stage, it won't work, and if you force him, you'll just make things worse. I've seen that developmental process when I tried to teach children drawing (without forcing them).

John Stuart Mill's father brought him up speaking Hebrew and Greek. John wound up in a mental hospital. Fortunately he got out and wrote a few good books.

Exactly, WABR would be the right test for all of these and I do think your alternatives would work better.

Although, virtually no dating "advice" for men can ever work really well, because studies have shown that when you ask women under lie-detector conditions, the thing they care overwhelmingly about is physical looks:
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.c...
and this corresponds pretty well with actual dating preferences as revealed by which men get the most inquiries on dating sites, etc. This might actually be the one question on which there is the greatest gap between what professional researchers have found with their studies, and what the public thinks that the studies have found -- almost all of the public thinks that "studies show" women care more about personality. (By contrast, with global warming, yes there is a near-universal consensus among scientists, but at least a large part of the public is on board with that consensus as well.)

Thus the dating advice that tends to get passed around the most, probably has little to do with CBR versus WABR. The dating advice which endures is the kind that is unfalsifiable, so that even if it doesn't work, you can never show the advice-giver any evidence will change their mind. If someone tells you to be "confident", and it doesn't work, they can just say that "deep down", you weren't confident "enough". They're never going to say, "Oh, I guess my advice didn't work. Sorry about that."

There is also a lot of evidence that they don't.

Except that NONE of these studies say polygraphs "don't work". Instead they say they are imperfect, and often used incorrectly or even maliciously. Which is a different thing.

"Anyway, there is evidence that they work significantly better than chance on untrained people that believe they work. In other words, most of the time for most people."

There is also a lot of evidence that they don't. Or rather: it may be "significantly more than chance", but not enough more to be really useful.

Quote from the first sentence of that first link:

"Most psychologists agree that there is little evidence that polygraph tests can accurately detect lies."

And from the second:

"For federal agencies, the polygraph is a way to get around discrimination laws. There is virtually no appeal you can make if you are failed by a federal polygrapher. The polygraph is a license to abuse power."

And from the conclusion of the third:

"The instrument cannot itself detect deception... false positive rate (innocent persons found deceptive) ranged from 0 to 75 percent and averaged 19.1 percent;"

An average of over 19% false positive rate (government's own figures), and as high as 75%, means the polygraph is effectively useless as a lie detector for any serious purposes. That's a HUGE false positive rate. It simply isn't a basis for punishing someone when there is an almost 20% chance on average that the results are false. And that's just false positives... there are false negatives too.

I repeat: the government knows this, and uses it more as an instrument of intimidation, in order to try to wring confessions out of people, than anything else. Many ex-government-polygraphers -- and subjects of polygraph exams, for that matter -- have told the same story.

You're probably thinking of anisomycin as heard on RADIOLAB.

No, they're looking for a deviation from a standard mean. What's being measured is objective, and in fact the US military has designed an algorithm to do the work of the "expert" in your case... which they are evaluating right now in Afghanistan, and preliminary results suggest that with a little bit of modification and more samples, can be as good as the expert. So there is no "interpretation", unless a computer algorithm, using bitwise operations, to arrive at a pass/fail result, is somehow a subjective thing for you.

The problem is that there is a lack of evidence associating those deviations with the act of lying. In the words of the American Psychological Association, "there is no evidence that any pattern of physiological reactions is unique to deception." Therefore those measurements are just measurements without any real meaning. Yes, there's a correlation to lying, but it isn't a particularly strong one, and that is why any interpretation of a polygraph is inherently subjective: because somebody has to determine whether the indicators on the page are being caused by the subject engaging in deception or through some other cause, and there is no known scientific way of doing this.

The mouth and nose area are also important indicators of (micro)emotion ( http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2011/05/facial-expressions.aspx ), which could explain why many people (and women especially, I've noticed) regularly glance at that area when they are talking themselves. I believe it is to gauge the emotional reaction of the conversation partner to what they are saying.

See also:
http://theconversation.com/face-value-where-to-look-when-you-want-to-read-someone-11219

IALA

The real crime here is that law enforcement agencies are using such a notoriously unreliabletechnology for investigatory and evidentiary purposes.

This perversion of justice goes far beyond the first amendment and is an unprecedented power grab by the feds. The feds have no legal grounds to imaginate laws out of thin air and Congress is forbidden by the United States Constitution (clause 3, Article I, Section 9 - "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."). If you want to know just how illegal and unconstitutional the "patriot act" is in regarding permanent imprisonment with out trial, just read up on what a Bill of Attainder is (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Attainder). The whole "this is against the law because our 'secret' administrative rules say so" mentality of the Obama administration simply has to stop.

IALA

The real crime here is that law enforcement agencies are using such a notoriously unreliabletechnology for investigatory and evidentiary purposes. Polygraphs have absolutely no place in the modern justice system.

It's obvious you're a paid Microsoft shill based on the fact that you're on a brand new account

Yes Microsoft actually pays people to post in the comments section of slashdot because they really give a shit what's written here *golfclap*

but I'll bite anyway.

Translation: I don't really believe what I wrote, I'm just trying to establish a dominant position in the argument, if I really believed it then replying would be a waste of time.

Google does not use psychologists

Yes they do, why are you lying for?

the left ... crazy ... abortion... Obama

wow, way to run off the rails there. seek counseling


Granted, you have a point about a potential flaw in that proposal regarding the realities of an unregulated market.

Your opinion on adoption by same-sex couples isn't supported by social science.

Should infertile heterosexual couples be permitted to marry and adopt children? Their relationships are also "destined to be sterile."

Bryan & Harter (1899) noticed telegraph operators could identify one another through rhythm and style, nice to see someone finally apply that! :-)

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/6/4/345/

i really REALLY don't get this obsession with linking violent video games to violent behavior.

I am probably going to get modded down for this... But the reason this is a topic of focus is due to the fact that there is significant research basis for it being true.

http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2003/10/anderson.aspx

The science is settled with this a long time ago from the vast majority of behavioral psychologists, but the media (who profits from this) and players ignore it, just like climate change... Violent Video Games: Myths, Facts, and Unanswered Questions (from the American Psychological Association)

Quote: Myth 1. Violent video game research has yielded very mixed results. Facts: Some studies have yielded nonsignificant video game effects, just as some smoking studies failed to find a significant link to lung cancer. But when one combines all relevant empirical studies using meta-analytic techniques, five separate effects emerge with considerable consistency. Violent video games are significantly associated with: increased aggressive behavior, thoughts, and affect; increased physiological arousal; and decreased prosocial (helping) behavior. Average effect sizes for experimental studies (which help establish causality) and correlational studies (which allow examination of serious violent behavior) appear comparable (Anderson & Bushman, 2001). Myth 8. Unrealistic video game violence is completely safe for adolescents and older youths. Facts: Cartoonish and fantasy violence is often perceived (incorrectly) by parents and public policy makers as safe even for children. However, experimental studies with college students have consistently found increased aggression after exposure to clearly unrealistic and fantasy violent video games. Indeed, at least one recent study found significant increases in aggression by college students after playing E-rated (suitable for everyone) violent video games. Myth 9. The effects of violent video games are trivially small. Facts: Meta-analyses reveal that violent video game effect sizes are larger than the effect of second hand tobacco smoke on lung cancer, the effect of lead exposure to I.Q. scores in children, and calcium intake on bone mass. Furthermore, the fact that so many youths are exposed to such high levels of video game violence further increases the societal costs of this risk factor (Rosenthal, 1986).

... and An update on the effects of playing violent video games (Journal of Adolescence), where they say...

Quote: Basically, the scientific debate over whether media violence has an effect is over, and should have been over by 1975 (Bushman & Anderson, 2001).There are a number of negative behavioural, cognitive, and affective consequences of exposure to violent entertainment media, in both the immediate context as well as developmentally across time (for an excellent and current overview, see Gentile, 2003). Three findings are particularly important.First, as more studies of violent video games have been conducted, the significance of violent video game effects on key aggression and helpingrelated variables has become clearer.Second, the claim (or worry) that poor methodological characteristics of some studies has led to a false, inflated conclusion about violent video game effects is simply wrong.Third, video game studies with better methods typically yield bigger effects, suggesting that heightened concern about deleterious effects of exposure to violent video games is warranted. The magnitude of these effects is also somewhat alarming.The best estimate of the effect size of exposure to violent video games on aggressive behaviour is about 0.26 (Fig.2 ).This is larger than the effect of condom use on decreased HIV risk, the effect of exposure to passive smoke at work and lung cancer, and the effect of calcium intake on bone mass (Bushman & Huesmann, 2001).As a society, we have taken massive and expensive steps to educate the public about these smaller medical effects, but almost none to deal with the larger violent video game effects. I could quote more, but got my point across.

Go ahead and be like a climate change denier and say all those behavior psychologist studies are all wrong...

Got to love the U.K. 'You viewed porn on your computer?! OMG You are a child molester! GAOL 4 U." Don't worry though, the religious right here in the U.S. desires Taliban like laws to the same effect.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-sunny-side-of-smut is a decent summary of a few studies that pretty much say 'What internet porn problem?'

If you google 'effects of porn on children' you'll get tons of results saying the terrible scary things that will happen, but most made on actual studies read more like this http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov07/webporn.aspx .

So it seems that all this hand waving by Cameron is about getting reelected and society control.

There's no presumably about it. When White Men Can't Do Math, Stereotype threat and the intellectual performance of African Americans (and pdf). Stereotype threat and the academic underperformance of minorities and women.

You can put anyone down, make them feel bad, and make them less than they are. And then we all lose what they could be contributing.

There's no presumably about it. When White Men Can't Do Math, Stereotype threat and the intellectual performance of African Americans (and pdf). Stereotype threat and the academic underperformance of minorities and women.

You can put anyone down, make them feel bad, and make them less than they are. And then we all lose what they could be contributing.

Believe it or not, this has been studied.

I can't seem to find the paper I wanted to reference, but here are a few others that might interest you:

The Effects of a LOGO Computer Programming Experience on Readiness for First Grade, Creativity, and Self Concept.
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ320159&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ320159

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/edu/76/6/1051/
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J025v04n02_07#preview
http://surface.syr.edu/eecs_etd/256/

Sorry, I did overestimate. It's more like $800 per inch per year.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/standing.aspx

If you're experiencing that problem, the message is, "I like you, but not in THAT way". Unfortunately, what triggers "THAT way" varies from person to person. You can do general things to increase your odds - good grooming, be confident, get good at maintaining an interesting conversation, etc - but ultimately each woman's particular tastes will come into play. And they can be contradictory. For example, some women will be really bothered by it if you move too fast, while others want a guy who will push them up against a wall and totally make out with them (although - it should be noted - still respecting the word "no" if it comes up). And let's not even get into all the differences in what physical characteristics people find attractive.

Note that how attractive you think you are probably has little correlation with how attractive you actually are, for good or bad. See this study for details - basically, women correlate about 0.5 with raters on their self-perceived attractiveness, but men only 0.1. Also, other studies seem to show that it's easier for men to rank women consistently in terms of attraction than for women to rank men; women' perceptions of mens' attractiveness has been shown to vary even on factors like whether they're looking for short-term or long-term partners and their current hormone levels.

The basic gist of it is, clear up any obvious problems, both physical (bad acne, foul odor, etc) and socially (being able to maintain a normal conversation, coming across as confident instead of super-nervous, etc), and while you can't guarantee every girl is going to want you, some will. Remember that women are playing their own "game" on the dating scene, whether it's looking for someone for a relationship or just someone to sleep with, and just like you, they're overthinking everything that they do and hoping that they find the right person.

BTW - just as a personal datapoint, but 80-90% of the time if I'm not seeing someone and end up in a flirty conversation with someone who wants me and who I'm attracted to, but nothing happens, the reason was, "he didn't make a move soon enough, and I felt the need to move on". The thought I'm usually thinking is, "quit trying to talk me into bed and just kiss me already!" And, BTW, yes, I know it's totally unfair to you guys that you're expected to do all the work - to approach and strike up a conversation with a girl you don't know, to make the first move, etc. But courage and confidence are, rightly or wrongly, generally very attractive characteristics in a guy, and that's how you demonstrate them. And it's very much quite possible that she already scoped you out a long time ago and is hoping that you'll come talk to her.

• The definition of rape excludes coercion and abuses of power (one yes to question 4, 5, 8, 9, or 10 is required), but includes attempted but not completed acts (which is how a 1 in 4 figure is reported; without lumping attempted rape with successful rape, the figure drops to 1 in 7).
• The "alcohol or drugs" questions -- a large fraction of the victims -- does not actually meet the legal definition of rape cited by the study. It does not require that alcohol or drugs have been given for the purpose of impairing a woman's judgment; a man who buys a glass of wine for a woman is not necessarily doing so as part of a plot to rape the woman. The study asks if a woman had sex with a man "because" he gave her alcohol or drugs; that may very well include women who had sex with men in order to obtain drugs, women who had sex with a man following a date where alcohol played a significant role (and where the lack of alcohol would have made the date boring etc.), and so forth.
  
  More importantly, in followup interview, Dr. Koss noted that this question was worded poorly, and had this question been excluded, the figure drops to 1 in 9:
  
  http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=w2NPAAAAIBAJ&jtp=5
  
  (Hard to read, sorry; Toledo Blade, October 10, 1993)
• The premise of the study is that excluding the word "rape" leads to more accurate results; yet this is not actually proved anywhere, nor is any citation given. The assumption is that victims may not use the word "rape" to characterize what happened, but this is not demonstrated by the study. It may be the case that not using the word rape leads to an inflated figure.
  
  The original blog post was criticizing someone who pointed out that, in later statements, Koss admitted that 73% of the victims were not actually sure they had been raped. This is probably because of the serious connotations of the word "rape," which (rightly) conjures images of psychological harm, difficulty trusting men following the incident, years of counseling, etc. -- that is what I have seen in the rape victims that I know. People have doubts about the 1 in 4 figure for this very reason: it is not the case that 1 in 4 women require years of counseling due to a rape. The Koss study points out that rape victims often develop PTSD years later; it has been over 20 years, yet we do not have an epidemic of adult women with PTSD.
  
  Somewhere between the Koss study and the common understanding of rape, even among the victims identified in the study, there is a disconnect -- at some point, the Koss study's findings diverge from what people understand to be rape.
• The 1987 study omits a question from the original sexual experiences survey that Koss developed in 1982: "Have you ever been raped?" In that trial version of that study (only at one university), a mere 6% of women answered "yes," even though 8.2% reported having unwanted sexual intercourse while being physically restrained (note that both of these are lower than what the 1987 study found). Why omit this question? The 13th question in the 1982 version illustrates the disconnect mentioned above.
  
  https://encrypted.google.com/url?q=http://doi.apa.org/journals/ccp/50/3/455.pdf&sa=U&ei=_n8EUICPM4eW0QHlzrnoBw&ved=0CBEQFjAA&usg=AFQjCNG4492vfopHDTbiHXc3c69HIvUCJQ

To reiterate, this is no defense of rapists; rapists are predators, who strike opportunistically and who present a real threat. Yet widely cited studies like this one -- it is not as though

Schellenberg, E. G., von Scheve, C.:
Emotional Cues in American Popular Music: Five Decades of the Top 40

(paywalled)

I think we often miss the point of why relatives are so often the perpetrators of child abuse. It's a proximity and trust thing. If "strangers" could get that level of trust easily (say, with candy, videogames, music, fancy vans with no windows, or anything else you might warn your kids about) I think child abuse by people the victims don't know would be far more common.

Another key point is we often lump all child abuse into one grouping. A whopping 84% of all child abuse is done by a child's biological parents, but 60% of child *sexual* abuse is done by people known to the child but who are not family members (babysitters, teachers, family friends, neighbors etc). People completely unknown to the child only comprise about 10% of sexual abuses, most of the rest are family. You were close; family members are FAR more common perpetrators than strangers, but that third category of abusers - non-family members in authority positions - make up the majority of sexual abusers.

Sources:
http://faq.acf.hhs.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/70/~/who-typically-abuses-children%3F
http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/child-sexual-abuse.aspx

Of course, all of this explains why child abuse in any form is such a violation of the kids in question; these are the people who are supposed to be teaching kids about and protecting kids from the world, but instead these people are harming them. These children tend to learn there IS no safe place or person, and that's a tough lesson to learn that young.

As a brief anecdote (feel free to skip if it's TL;DR. It only serves as a personal example proving no statistics, just how it sometimes happens):

My "inappropriate touching" guy was my piano teacher when I was 9. He had all sorts of "games" to play when I did well on the lessons. I knew the guy; he was from our church ward, and he was always sort of antisocially creepy, like the house the kids don't want to trick or treat at kind of thing. Shit started to get WAY creepy though. That's a difficult spot to be in as a kid; my folks PAY this guy to teach me piano one hour a week, and I really was learning the piano, and he was a nice enough guy when he wasn't being creepy and pushy as fuck, so what was I supposed to do? I mean, some of the stuff was sorta... oogily nice at the time, I guess, but when I thought about it after the fact it was just half guilt (shame? shrug) and half gross. I didn't want to see the guy in jail forever, or whatever; just to get him to knock it off and not feel... responsible for any of it, I guess. I just ended up quitting piano, instead of dealing with it directly. Looking back, I wouldn't say it damaged me permanently or anything, but it was an odd and emotionally complicated way to learn how to "make the white stuff come out" (admittedly, certain specifics got burned permanently into memory). Last I heard, some 25 years ago, a different kid DID tell his folks, and the guy ended up getting arrested. Not sure what happened after that. To this day, I don't have any hate for the guy; it wouldn't serve any purpose. OTOH, I do sure as *hell* keep tabs on who watches my little girls a lot more closely because of it.

My point specifically was about creating a save zone for the off-spring which is quite common accross all mammals and is often also directed against male sexual aggression.

http://www.mendeley.com/research/functional-aspects-of-maternal-aggression-in-mammals/

To the extend that it is established that human children can suffer from depictions of violence this is an extension of this principle.

And yes, the detrimental impact on children by violence depicted in visual media is well established as illustrated by the various references that I already included in the other comment:

http://www.apa.org/research/action/protect.aspx

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2003/03/media-violence.aspx

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1986.tb00246.x/abstract

http://mediasmarts.ca/backgrounder/kids-net-seven-and-eight-year-olds

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/pr040527.cfm

My point specifically was about creating a save zone for the off-spring which is quite common accross all mammals and is often also directed against male sexual aggression.

http://www.mendeley.com/research/functional-aspects-of-maternal-aggression-in-mammals/

To the extend that it is established that human children can suffer from depictions of violence this is an extension of this principle.

And yes, the detrimental impact on children by violence depicted in visual media is well established as illustrated by the various references that I already included in the other comment:

http://www.apa.org/research/action/protect.aspx

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2003/03/media-violence.aspx

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1986.tb00246.x/abstract

http://mediasmarts.ca/backgrounder/kids-net-seven-and-eight-year-olds

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/pr040527.cfm

Oh my! You are a father?

And you don't even bother with a quick search to double check if maybe your initial statements might be false.

Two minutes of web search:

http://www.apa.org/research/action/protect.aspx

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2003/03/media-violence.aspx

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1986.tb00246.x/abstract

http://mediasmarts.ca/backgrounder/kids-net-seven-and-eight-year-olds

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/pr040527.cfm

BTW I am not concerned about simple nudity or a normal sex act, it is very specifically the mixture of aggression and sex that is most concerning. That is why I repeatedly cited "Fisting" and "Ball Torture".

Your comment has certainly ruined my day and is very depressing. I originally chalked this nonsense up to teenage immaturity. If you are in fact a parent and yet so proudly display your ignorance on this topic, then this is disturbing on many levels.

And yes, you are also entirely wrong about learning. You are essentially negating decades of neurological, psychological, AI and educational research. The key here is how category learning works and the path towards more abstract thought processes.

Don't think though that any of this will penetrate you pre-conceived notion.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3403200097.html

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1641285

http://web.cs.dal.ca/~sraza/papers/Malay_journal.pdf

Oh my! You are a father?

And you don't even bother with a quick search to double check if maybe your initial statements might be false.

Two minutes of web search:

http://www.apa.org/research/action/protect.aspx

http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2003/03/media-violence.aspx

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1986.tb00246.x/abstract

http://mediasmarts.ca/backgrounder/kids-net-seven-and-eight-year-olds

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/pr040527.cfm

BTW I am not concerned about simple nudity or a normal sex act, it is very specifically the mixture of aggression and sex that is most concerning. That is why I repeatedly cited "Fisting" and "Ball Torture".

Your comment has certainly ruined my day and is very depressing. I originally chalked this nonsense up to teenage immaturity. If you are in fact a parent and yet so proudly display your ignorance on this topic, then this is disturbing on many levels.

And yes, you are also entirely wrong about learning. You are essentially negating decades of neurological, psychological, AI and educational research. The key here is how category learning works and the path towards more abstract thought processes.

Don't think though that any of this will penetrate you pre-conceived notion.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3403200097.html

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1641285

http://web.cs.dal.ca/~sraza/papers/Malay_journal.pdf

The way this article has been put forth makes it seem as if listening to music at work decreases productivity. Not so. the study is about comparing personality types and see if introvert Vs. extrovert has an impact on productivity. The last line on the website says *"These findings suggest that people will learn more when revising for an exam or perform better at work if tasks are performed in silence regardless of personality type, and frequency of listening to music when working does not affect performance. So to conclude: no, listening to music unfortunately won’t increase your concentration."*. There are other studies that show no correlation between the two http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/50/6/493/ (login required). Also, there are other factors like employee morale and happiness that improve by music (http://www.musicworksforyou.com/workplace-productivity/radio-in-the-workplace-increasing-morale-a-productivity.html) that are unaccounted. In short biased, stupid and sensationalistic. Sorry!

Took me about a minute to understand what you were saying. Next time, please do us all a favor and say "Some psychologists prefer the term 'client' instead to avoid the negative connotation associated with the word 'patient'.". This helps you get your point across and also enlighten those of us who aren't familiar with this particular piece of political correctness.

I boldfaced "some" because the American Psychological Association still use the word "patients". As long as one psychologist still use the word "patients" in this world, your statement is false. A little qualifier goes a long way and that's especially true in a discussion about over-generalizations.

In the 1950s Robert G. Heath began using deep brain stimulation for many illnesses including depression.

Electrical self-stimulation of the brain in man

Modulation of emotion with a brain pacemaker

http://www.google.ca/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=Deep+Brain+Stimulation+in+Neurological+and+Psychiatric+Disorders&btnG=

In the 1950s Robert G. Heath began using deep brain stimulation for many illnesses including depression.

Electrical self-stimulation of the brain in man

Modulation of emotion with a brain pacemaker

http://www.google.ca/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q=Deep+Brain+Stimulation+in+Neurological+and+Psychiatric+Disorders&btnG=

Don't think it's discrimination or harassment that we're seeing here. Girls dominate boys in the math and scientific disciplines right up until about puberty.

I imagine with those wonderful changes that occur around that time, their priorities in life change. More focus on a social life, less focus on an academic life.

And programming, like most scientific, mathematical, and engineering disciplines, on the sliding scale of social interactions, is near the end most commonly associated with hermits. And it will probably never change, no matter how hard someone tries to "cure" the programming field of its "lack of females problem."

An online survey of 3,461 North American girls ages 8-12 conducted in the summer of 2010 through Discovery Girls magazine examined the relationships between social well-being and young girls' media use-including video, video games, music listening, reading/homework, e-mailing/posting on social media sites, texting/instant messaging, and talking on phones/video chatting-and face-to-face communication. This study introduced both a more granular measure of media multitasking and a new comparative measure of media use versus time spent in face-to-face communication. Regression analyses indicated that negative social well-being was positively associated with levels of uses of media that are centrally about interpersonal interaction (e.g., phone, online communication) as well as uses of media that are not (e.g., video, music, and reading). Video use was particularly strongly associated with negative social well-being indicators. Media multitasking was also associated with negative social indicators. Conversely, face-to-face communication was strongly associated with positive social well-being. Cell phone ownership and having a television or computer in one's room had little direct association with children's socioemotional well-being. We hypothesize possible causes for these relationships, call for research designs to address causality, and outline possible implications of such findings for the social well-being of younger adolescents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

I don't have access to the study itself. I hope that any peer-reviewed study would address the concerns you voiced (and many more). Obviously the CNN article is crap; in the absence of more information, I'll at least give the article the benefit of the doubt and suspend judgement.

When you are distracted while driving you are not using your full attention to focus on the task at hand, which is guiding about a ton or so at high speed where merely the errant twitch can kill or permanently injure someone.

There are many, many studies in cognitive science that have shown that any distraction while driving reduces your ability to react, your reaction time, and the quality of your judgement. Your brain has a finite amount of resources and you are expending them on paying attention to the phone. In any case, cell phones are currently one of the most avoidable distractions out there. It stands to reason they'd be the first targeted for "banning."

Turn your phone off while driving. It could save a life.

There've been some milder studies vaguely like that in monkeys. In one such study, a monkey is given a cord that, if pulled, gives it some food. In the control group, that's all; in the experimental group, pulling the cord also shocks another monkey. They are much less willing to pull the "also shocks someone else" cord. That can be interpreted as a form of empathetic altruism, foregoing a reward to avoid harming someone else. A counter-argument is that it's not altruism so much as monkeys finding expressions of distress unpleasant, meaning they avoid pulling a cord that results in unpleasant sounds: a selfish behavior, because the real goal is to avoid hearing sounds they don't like. On the third hand, that counter-argument is hard to actually separate from "real" empathy, because one potential mechanism for (some kinds of) empathy is that we find it unpleasant to hear expressions of distress from others who are similar enough to us.

You're advocating for people beat their children more, and yet ~I'm the one "with little empathy for others"?

I'm not an expert on psychology or child development, but the experts sure seem to disagree with you:
http://www.apa.org/about/governance/council/policy/corporal-punishment.aspx

Not that it has any bearing on whether children deserve to be beaten, but she ~does have ataxic cerebral palsy. It's in the second article you link to.

What's your take on elder abuse? Should we take off our belts and beat the crap out of our grandparents if they buy unauthorized copies of prescription drugs on the black market? Is a judge who beats his elderly parents for such behavior fit to decide cases involving elder abuse? Does the level of senility of a little old man really have any bearing on whether his children should ever beat him with a belt?

For the record, Zimbardo has objected to Das Experiment's portrayal of his experiment, on the grounds that (a) it isn't clear which parts are reenactments and which parts are fictionalized, and (b) in his view the movie doesn't properly explain why the study was scientifically important. Read his side of it here.

So, you think firearms, tobacco, alcohol, cars, small explosives, pornography, sudafed, joining the military, getting married to pedophiles, and every other thing currently restricted to 16,18,21+ or any other age is an insanely stupid law that infringes on your right to raise your kid?

Oh, and here's a question: What do any of these things have to do with video games? No one ever died, got lung cancer, got liver failure, blew off a hand, made illegal drugs, went to war, or was molested by any video game.

You're still making assumptions about my beliefs. Please read my post carefully, I'll try to be clearer.

I only mentioned pornography as an example of what is currently constitutionally restricted, but I do see where you got confused.
What do "illegal drugs" have to do with liver failure, cancer, dieing, losing body parts, killing people, or molesting people? Why would you even group those together?

I wasn’t just talking about drugs here, I was responding to your list of restricted items that you seem to think somehow justify restricting video games. I’ll break it down item by item:
Firearms: untrained use may lead to death
Tobacco: any use by anyone may lead to cancer and death
Alcohol: use may lead to liver cancer or death
Cars: untrained use may lead to death
Small explosives: untrained use may lead to losing body parts or even death
Sudafed: trained use may lead to creation of illegal drugs, untrained use may lead to exploding meth labs, overdose, and death
Joining the military: use may lead to death
Video games: untrained use may result in not completing the level?

See the difference? All of the restricted items you mentioned, except porn, can lead to death (yours or others) when used improperly, and are therefore restricted. Video games cannot. I pointed these out to show that most of your examples were irrelevant and can be ignored. The extremely rare case of someone dying while playing video games is a straw man. The guy was playing an MMO that wouldn’t have been restricted anyway, the guy wasn’t a minor, and he’d spent far more money on his binge than any minor likely could. In fact, if he had been a minor, I suspect his parents would have prevented it from happening.

What is so bad about "illegal drugs" besides not having "The Man's" permission to produce/procure/sell/possess them?

This is another conversation entirely. For the record, I am pro-legalization of all illegal drugs, but let’s not get sidetracked.

One could say you only *perceive* guns and alcohol as dangerous as properly trained and used correctly, they're both quite fun, and safe.

One could certainly say that, but one would be incorrect. Guns and alcohol are inherently dangerous, which is why they require proper training and use to be safe. Video games are no more inherently dangerous than monopoly, and violent video games are no more inherently dangerous than discussing or studying violence.

But how about some more long term negative effects of violent video games:

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2010-26571-001 habitual media violence exposure predicted faster accessibility of aggressive cognitions,

In other words, seeing a lot of violence in media (that is media as in tv/radio/games, not media as in cnn), makes it easier to be aggressive.

It’s weird how the abstract linked above doesn’t mention anything about video games. I only see mentions of violent movie clips. Are you proposing that we ban the sale of violent movies to minors? If so, good luck with that.
We could play dueling link to studies supporting our sides all day, but I stand by the assertion that there is no credible evidence supporting the

I only mentioned pornography as an example of what is currently constitutionally restricted, but I do see where you got confused. Now...

Oh, and here's a question: What do any of these things have to do with video games? No one ever died, got lung cancer, got liver failure, blew off a hand, made illegal drugs, went to war, or was molested by any video game.

What do "illegal drugs" have to do with liver failure, cancer, dieing, losing body parts, killing people, or molesting people? Why would you even group those together? What is so bad about "illegal drugs" besides not having "The Man's" permission to produce/procure/sell/possess them?

The fact that you can lump together things that are *actually* dangerous (guns and alcohol) with things that you only perceive as dangerous (pornography and video games)

One could say you only *perceive* guns & alcohol as dangerous as properly trained and used correctly, they're both quite fun, and safe.

But then, http://www.themedguru.com/20110223/newsfeature/chinese-man-dies-after-playing-video-games-non-stop-3-days-86143775.html, nobody ever died by using a game or alcohol too much, right?

But how about some more long term negative effects of violent video games:

http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2010-26571-001
habitual media violence exposure predicted faster accessibility of aggressive cognitions,

In other words, seeing a lot of violence in media (that is media as in tv/radio/games, not media as in cnn), makes it easier to be aggressive.

So you have the extreme possible immediate harm caused by irresponsible usage (as most anything can, and kids are often known to do), and subtle negative long term damage (ever seen a 40 year alcoholic's liver, or a a 40 year angry man's coronary, the negative effects on both quality and duration of life are comparable)... shown by respected scientific studies to be real dangers. How about an unsubstantiated (because I've run out of time to get an actual link... I'm sure you can find something) harmful effect in between? Getting fired, cut from the team, expelled, etc due to excessive usage or mimicking/imitating something seen or done in the game?

So now we have "illegal drugs" that you equate as a negative side effect akin to losing a hand or dieing of cancer and I see as a wonderful and safe way to alter my state of mind (Which most vertebre, including you, seek to do); violent video games which have scientifically suspected harmful effects that you disagree with, but which I lend some credibility to; and guns which, despite any confusion by my earlier arguments, both of us seem to agree with the law that kids should not have unrestricted access to.

Now you have 3 options to deal with the disagreements:

• Total cave-in to my beliefs
• compromise
• screw you, its my way or the highway

Lucky for us, the country is founded on compromise and understanding... its a constitutional democracy. The combination generally lets the majority get what they want, while keeping the extremes in line by way of the Constitution. However, the founding fathers understood that the Constitution even could be abused, so they put in the courts to help ensure things were interpreted reasonably according to the believed goals of the framers. Hence Freedom of Speech has been consistently and continuously upheld as NOT being license to say anything you want; you can't slander, libel, incite riot or insurrection, or use any other form of speech that has a reasonably good chance of harming others. But because we

I lost the "instinctive" one long ago,

A curious statement. Unless you've been in a situation where you've had all intellectual impediments to killing removed and seen that you were in fact able and willing to kill, I'm not sure how you can assert this. Have you killed a human being?

judging from the amount of people that view/play violent entertainment,

"Viewing" and "playing" are completely different. Viewing does not train a behavior, playing does.

if at all (if it happens, there's no real evidence for it)

Remarkable how the /. groupthink simply disregards the existence of evidence on this issue. One can certainly argue that the evidence is not conclusive, but to say that it's nonexistent demonstrates either gross ignorance or a strong unwillingness to step beyond one's personal biases and look at the matter scientifically. It takes only a few minutes of Google-fu to turn up studies like these:

• "In Study 2, laboratory exposure to a graphically violent video game increased aggressive thoughts and behavior."
• An updated meta-analysis reveals that exposure to violent video games is significantly linked to increases in aggressive behaviour, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, and cardiovascular arousal, and to decreases in helping behaviour. Experimental studies reveal this linkage to be causal.
• In two experiments, we found that playing violent video games increased dehumanization, which in turn evoked aggressive behavior. Thus, it appears that video-game-induced aggressive behavior is triggered when victimizers perceive the victim to be less human.

Is the evidence conclusive? Maybe not. Does any amount of evidence that games cause an increase in aggression potential justify censorship? No. Censorship is real violence.

http://www.apa.org/ happy to help