Swearing as an Anesthetic, IQ vs. SES, and Manspreading in Other Primates
The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Linkfest for April 2024
Greetings friends, and welcome to my latest Linkfest: a collection of articles and papers that caught my eye over the last few weeks. Topics covered this time include the pain-relieving properties of taboo language and gestures, IQ vs. socioeconomic status as predictors of life outcomes for teens, and - as usual - some fascinating new research on sex differences.
You can access the complete collection of Linkfests here.
Hot Off the Press: New Findings in Psychology
Mind Over Matter
1. According to a famous study in psychology, swearing is a good anesthetic: Dropping an F-bomb or two after you hit your thumb with a hammer reduces the experience of pain. A new study has now extended this crucial research to show that giving the finger (aka flipping the bird) reduces pain as well. The paper detailing this finding is called “F@#k Pain! The Effect of Taboo Language and Gesture on the Experience of Pain.” Link.
Social Psychology
2. A recent study offers a new twist on the old Milgram obedience studies: People are more likely to follow experimental instructions that inflict harm on others when the experiment is linked to a hard science (i.e., neuroscience) than a soft science (i.e., social science). In light of its recent replication troubles, some might quibble with the suggestion that neuroscience is a hard science. But as long as people perceive it as such, the study shows what it claims to show. Link.
3. Do White people prefer to see White people in ads? According to a recent meta-analysis, they don’t. They did in the past, but in the last decade or so, this own-race preference has evaporated. Indeed, if anything, White people now prefer to see Black people in ads. Meanwhile, Black people’s preference for seeing Black people in ads has remained largely static: Although it’s weakened a little, the change isn’t statistically significant. Link.
Political Psychology
4. American left-wingers think Jesus was a left-winger; American right-wingers think he was a right-winger. Interestingly, this is true not only of devoted Christians but also of nominal ones. If it were just the devoted Christians, we might think they were using their pre-existing ideas about Jesus’s political views to guide their own views. But because it’s nominal Christians as well, it seems more likely that people are projecting their pre-existing political views onto their idea of Jesus. Link.
Intelligence
5. In an earlier Linkfest, I mentioned that better-looking people - and people with better looking lawyers - are more likely to be treated leniently in the criminal justice system. Well, here’s another advantage of the aesthetically blessed: They earn more. Interestingly, though, when you statistically control for intelligence, the correlation between looks and income vanishes for everyone other than sex workers. This suggests that - sex workers notwithstanding - good looks don’t boost earnings per se, but rather that better looking people tend to be smarter, and smartness boosts people’s earnings. Link. (But see this earlier Linkfest for a conflicting finding.)