Research // Current TV

Cure cancer in just two hours?

A recent research says a radioactive 'paste' could cure skin cancer in a... more

RachaelRichards
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7 days ago
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New Directions in the Art of the Moving Image

Washington, D.C.- The Smithsonian American Art Museum opened a new gallery dedicated... more

worrg
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12 days ago
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The Fluoride Conspiracy - the greatest case of scientific fraud of this century

The history of forcing fluoride on humans through the fluoridation of drinking water... more

worrg
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12 days ago
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BlackBerry maker Research in Motion chiefs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis step down

Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, the men who made BlackBerry the must-have smartphone... more

RachaelRichards
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18 days ago
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Scientists find fat is the sixth human taste

Scientists have discovered a sixth basic taste that the human tongue can detect... more

aileenalmeda
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24 days ago
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New research about cannabis use

Michael Balderstone of the Hemp Embassy in Nimbin is hopeful that new research will... more

Vierotchka
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1 month ago
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Chimpanzees are "largely unessential as research subjects" claim scientists

There's no important need to experiment on chimps, claim scientists

googygood
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1 month ago
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A belated Christmas present for Tommy and Mary - and all the other chimps who still need our help

The first time I remember “meeting” a chimp was when Tommy and Mary, two... more

naturallady
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1 month ago
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Dieting 'could keep brain young'

Dieting could boost your brain power because it activates a protein which helps the... more

ErinWatson
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1 month ago
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Will BlackBerry survive 2012?

Troubled BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion has announced further delays to its new... more

aileenalmeda
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1 month ago
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MAPS (suing DEA for Medical Cannabis Rights) Receives Pro-Bono Representation to Appeal Craker Case in First Circuit Court of Appeals

MAPS has received a generous offer for pro-bono legal representation from the... more

Tyrannous
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1 month ago
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Feds sending old & sick chimps back into research, despite public uproar?

After the public learned last winter that the National Institutes of Health was... more

naturallady
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2 months ago
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Astronauts' Dirty Laundry problem - solved

NASA wants space washing machine for ISS ........ NASA have moved at last to tackle... more

worrg
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2 months ago
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Shot for desertion in World War 1

During World War I, 306 British soldiers were shot for desertion. This episode of Find... more

leelondon
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2 months ago
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Mechanism in Brain Cancer Responsible for Neuron Death Discovered

Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center and the VCU... more

sitsi
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3 months ago
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Tactic to Delay Age-Related Disorders

Researchers at Mayo Clinic have shown that eliminating cells that accumulate with age... more

sitsi
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3 months ago
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What Makes People Vote Against Their Own Best Interests?

This is an excellent read. Most of us liberals have been perplexed as to why any working class stiff (especially those in the lower income brackets) would vote against his/her own best interest and vote for corporate and wealthy interests instead. I am so glad to read that there are those in the field of psychology who are also perplexed enough to research this phenomenon and try making sense as to the WHY people willingly hurt themselves and their families in this political conundrum? Perhaps armed with some answers to this riddle, those who vote against their interests will be able to open their eyes and realize, they are doing themselves in, little by little, republican by republican. But then again, Liberals also have a lot to learn, DO WE NOT? thinkingblue

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN?

What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.

I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ).

For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog). MORE HERE: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html
10 things we do not understand about humans. http://www.newscientist.com/special/ten-mysteries-of-you
Occupy Wall Street - We Shall Overcome http://www.thethinkingblue.com/occupywallstreet6week.htmlThis is an excellent read. Most of us liberals have been perplexed as to why any... more

thinkingblue
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3 months ago
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Smart and Funny Political News Satire: What's Next? Bachmann/Palin Jello Wrestling? Ironic News Report, Sept. 12, 2011

The Ironic News Report is a satirical news parody that skewers politics and current... more

IronicNewsReport
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5 months ago
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Neuroscience vs philosophy: free will is an illusion vs think again

The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007,... more

worrg
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5 months ago
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1 comment

Glow-in-the-dark cats against AIDS, other diseases

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a genome-based immunization... more

BKsaysAction
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5 months ago
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4 comments

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