psychology
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Change hurts: Influencing our energy behavior is messy business
Want to save the planet? Better not leave it up to the humans.
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Food Studies: the taste-testers' blind spots
Why taste tests conducted in controlled environments don’t tell the whole story.
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Best way to convince deniers: Butter them up
Well, it turns out Dave Roberts has been going about this talking to climate skeptics thing all wrong. If you want to get people to consider data that doesn't fit with their pet worldview, you should make them think really hard about how great they are. Then they'll be putty in your hands! And if you don't believe me, have I mentioned how fetching you look today?
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Maybe no one cares about climate change because we’re wired for extinction
Will we follow the Irish elk’s strange evolutionary path toward extinction?This piece was written by George Black. In my unending (and thus far, I have to confess, largely fruitless) attempts to figure out why Americans aren’t more alarmed about climate change, one of the more intriguing ideas I’ve heard recently was put to me by […]
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Looking at meat drives men into a fit of calmness, happiness
Canadian researchers recently steaked the claim that the sight of a big, juicy burger and other well-done meats soothes the savage and beastly instincts in men. But can vegetarians remain calm?
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Google searches for ‘global warming’ go down when unemployment rises
Do people care less about global warming during recessions? University of California economists Matthew Kahn and Matthew Kotchen have a new paper that uses three interesting measurements to suss out the relationship between "Environmental Concern and the Business Cycle."
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Why BP is a textbook psychopath
It’s good to know that a full six-plus weeks after the BP rig explosion killed 11 workers and initiated the slow painful murder of the Gulf Coast economy and ecology, our ever-watchful federal government has decided to launch an investigation into whether BP actually did something criminal. Thanks for jumping on this, Uncle Sam. Of […]
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Robert Cialdini
Art: Nat Damm Robert Cialdini Psychologist Tempe, Ariz. Robert Cialdini, 64, until recently a psychology and marketing professor at Arizona State University, wrote Influence, the classic book on persuasion. Lately he’s been researching the best ways to persuade people to save energy. In 2007, he coauthored a study [PDF] that found that giving people info […]
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'Chunking' Trash Out the Window, Texas Style
People are unfathomable, what drives and motivates them to do things is beyond our imagining.