Rob Sica
@robsica
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Following
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Statuses
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"Knowledge would have little allure if we did not have to overcome so much shame on the way to acquiring it." -Nietzsche
Fort Collins
Joined July 2010
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"Men bond by insulting each other and not really meaning it; women bond by complimenting each other and not really meaning it."
-
@robkhenderson
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"In short, people have a mechanism in their minds. It stops them from saying something that could lower their status, even if it’s true. And it propels them to say something that could increase their status, even if it’s false."
-
@robkhenderson
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"Overall, when looking across cultures, reducing patriarchy doesn’t make these and most other psychological sex differences go away, it makes them *larger*. So much for blaming patriarchy and sex role socialization."
-
@PsychoSchmitt
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"Evolutionary psychology has convincingly refuted the validity of the expectation that male and female workplace behavior should be the same."
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"rather than aiming to equalize sex ratios [...] we should strive to eliminate unjust impediments in STEM, then let the sex ratios set themselves as an emergent effect of individuals making informed decisions about what would suit them best"
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"The best explanation is that you pick the beliefs that match your personality, then unconscious or semi-conscious mechanisms in your mind go and find rationalizations for them."
-
@FakeNousBlog
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"researchers and policymakers need to exhaust alternative explanations based on people’s goals and social environments before assuming irrationality and to use methods that engage participants as partners not just targets of interventions"
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"Most men who commit acts of sexual violence are not men considered to be low in mate value, but rather men who are higher in status & power, already sexually successful, & can get away with a sexually coercive strategy with fewer negative repercussions"
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"What is dangerous is not an evolutionary biology faculty member saying that male and female are meaningful categories; it is someone speaking with institutional authority instructing her not to say so."
“I’d like to see 1984 restored as mandatory reading for Harvard students” (Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College)
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"Women killers do not go out looking for sexual pleasure with strangers. We could not find an unambiguous example of a single woman killing for sexual pleasure. Women serial killers usually stay at home and kill for resources such as financial gain."
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"Although relationships with both parents are important, a good relationship with dad is more protective against engagement in delinquent behaviors than is a good relationship with mom, especially for boys."
The Rise of Father Absence and Its Attendant Social Ills
archived 8 Mar 2023 19:45:18 UTC
archive.ph
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"Social animals fight not only for food, shelter, and mates but also to control an idea, namely the group's collective idea of ranks in the hierarchy. As a result, many conflicts have no visible resource at stake."
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"We argue that modern desire for social status hijack psychological mechanisms governing life history strategy, leading to maladaptive delays in marriage and reproduction."
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The eagerness of so many to piss on the prospect of an anonymous Journal of Controversial Ideas before it even publishes anything is one of the best reasons for its existence...
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"There may be a failure by many people -- *including ourselves* -- to see that our personal view of political truth is less fair and objective than it is biased and subjective."
-
@JoeUscinski
@MetacogniShane
@klofstad
[]
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"Cognitive scientists, including philosophers, should be more careful when relying on the embodied cognition literature."
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"gender equality does not require ignoring evidence for biological influences on sex differences, or insisting that sex differences are socially constructed"
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"In each country and region, more boys than girls aspired to a things-oriented or STEM occupation and more girls than boys to a people-oriented occupation. These sex differences were larger in countries with a higher level of women's empowerment."
Sex Differences in Adolescents' Occupational Aspirations: Variations Across Time and Place
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"the evidence available to date doesn’t even come close to proving that most of us walk around with unacknowledged and unconscious biases in our heads"
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These two books, among my top five of 2023, each refer to, and richly develop ideas from, Tetlock's great paper.
For those interested, this 2002 article by
@PTetlock
is one of the best articles making this general point:
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For fundamentals of the human predicament, imho the👑of textbooks is by
@ProfDavidBuss
...
What is your favorite textbook (in any field)?
Why is it your favorite?
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"This emphasis on the unconscious driving our behavior and influencing our judgements, decisions, and choices has been vastly over-emphasized."
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"The ultimate goal of emotions is not happiness, nor love, nor accurate predictions or memories. Rather, it is to produce behavior that benefits the genes that create the human mind. Nothing more. Nothing less."
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Damn, only on third chapter and this is already my favorite book of the year I've read so far...
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😮“'On the whole, traditional indigenous knowledges regarding medicine or cosmology are no less ‘true’ than modern scientific explanations.' [49%] of the women in our sample agree with this, differing significantly from the rest of the field. 42% of radicals concur"
Soooo, um...there are antiscience anthropologists? New article out on Anthropology’s New Science Wars
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"Sex researchers often come from psychology, making the field of sex research vulnerable to progressive values, a problem that is exacerbated by the special potency that values and ideology have on interpreting sexual behavior."
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"we found little support for the idea that psychological sex differences will vanish as societies develop... instead, it appears that the dominant feature of psychological sex differences is their robustness in the face of social change"
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"...we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment. You're going to be able to recite this sentence in your irritated sleep by the time we're done."
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“insight-oriented psychotherapies are highly susceptible to generating placebo insights, that is, illusions, deceptions, and adaptive self-misunderstandings that convincingly mimic veridical insight but have no genuine explanatory power”
Psychotherapy is hardly any more effective than a placebo sugar pill.
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815
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Early into this book and quite liking it: seems to be making good on its claim to provide a diversity of current perspectives and (of special interest to me) informed by critiques Mercier, Altay/Berriche/Acerbi, Williams, etc. have raised in recent years.
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"The claim that most individuals engage in subtle or overt forms of discrimination not only lacks empirical basis in many settings, it also may deteriorate rather than improve relationships between members of different social groups."
Important research on prejudice. We could all do this on our campuses.
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"Why should the study of human social psychology be entirely divorced from the foundational theories that have proven so useful in understanding thousands of other social species?" -
@ProfDavidBuss
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"the most persuasive forms of misinformation are likely misleading claims published by mainstream sources subsequently pushed by well-networked supersharers"
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Machery: "So, we have [in the IAT] a measure of attitude that is not reliable, does not predict behavior well, may not measure anything causally relevant, and does not give us access to the unconscious causes of human behavior." /
@philofbrains
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"...Thus, the Nurture Only theory asks us to believe not only that selection eliminated the differences for reasons unknown, but that learning and culture then coincidentally reproduced exactly the same differences in every culture on record. This is not a compelling thesis."
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If Nietzsche were resuscitated in 2023, wanted to reliably update his philosophical psychology, and skip all the bs and wrong turns in psychology over the intervening century, he would want to read these books.
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“We are inclined to label callously planned violence such as the Holocaust as ‘inhuman.’ But phylogenetically, of course, it is not inhuman at all. It is deeply human. No other mammal has such a deliberate approach to mass killing of its own species.”
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“Correlation does not imply a causal relation and we present several explanations for our results."
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"If you want to model the APA [American Psychiatric Association], you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other."
-
@slatestarcodex
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"1. Afternoon naps of a range of durations are effective boosters of vigilance and memory 2. Even persons who are not habitual nappers have evidenced nap benefits. 3. Naps can be beneficial for cognition even with adequate sleep the night before."
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"Waist-to-hip ratio is consistently attractive regardless of weight, too. People can be underweight or overweight and still possess an attractive ratio, and be viewed as attractive. That is, actual weight status seems less important than *where* that weight goes."
🔙 to
@AlexJonesPhD
for the🎵 8th day of attractiveness!🎵 In another two-parter, Alex discusses what makes a beautiful body! Today - waist-to-hip ratio 👗⌛
#12daysofattractiveness
#science
#crowdfunding
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"Women have committed some of the most disturbing serial killings ever seen in the United States... female serial killers have been misunderstood, overlooked, and underestimated."
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"A particularly novel finding of this study was that women desired greater resource investment to compensate for a lack of physical attractiveness in male partners." 😄
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"while women and men employ different competitive strategies and often pursue different goals, women may have an even greater motivation to compete with same-sex peers than men"
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"Starting from a position of trust keeps us open to evidence. Acting 'as if' we trust others allows us to update our understanding of other people. The person who trusts learns more about the world than the person who distrusts."
-
@robkhenderson
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1/3
💥 Superb. Highly recommend to anyone interested in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, 19th-century and/or contemporary philosophical pessimism, and/or existentially riveted by evolutionary psychology.
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"bad beliefs typically result not from truth-tracking social learning mechanisms but from a response to incentives in which the personal costs of error are low and the practical benefits of bias are high"
-
@danwilliamsphil
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"epistemic autonomy without intellectual humility leads to increased belief in misinformation, conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and decreased trust in scientific experts"
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"Apparently, empathy not only fails to stop negative acts like sadism, bullying, and terrorism, it motivates and promotes such acts."
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"If what looks like moral progress is actually driven by signaling behavior, then we might think of it more like a series of changes in moral fashion than as a serious, consistent improvement in moral beliefs."
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⚡️ Published version finally available!
The single most important paper to date on "misinformation" that I know of -- from
@Sacha_Altay
,
@berriche_manon
, &
@acerbialberto
...
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"The prevalence of psychopathy in the general adult population can be estimated at 4.5%... significantly higher among workers in some organizations and companies (e.g., managers, executives, procurement and supply professionals, advertising workers)"
Looks like about 8% of men (and 3% of women) are psychopaths...
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"I am both surprised & a little bemused by how often I have been wrong about the things that I believed about depression as little as a decade ago... It is time 2 rethink how best 2 treat it in a manner that takes these new perspectives into consideration"
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"Queer theory would predict that males who identify as women would have the same low rate of sexual offending as females. This prediction is spectacularly false."
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"Social animals fight not only for food, shelter, and mates but also to control an idea, namely the group's collective idea of ranks in the hierarchy. As a result, many conflicts have no visible resource at stake."
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"Modern psychological theory is informed far more by data about how people interact with stimuli on a computer screen than with events in the real world."
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"even when there are hundreds of studies reaching some conclusion, those conclusions may not be justified... implicit bias [IB] is a perfect illustration of this problem... everything about IB remains scientifically contested"
-Honeycutt &
@PsychRabble
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"Twin studies indicate that the heritability of optimism is around 24% whereas it is 29% for pessimism."
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“To the extent that we select for only the most pro-social people, we might actually be making science more vulnerable not just to censorship, but to some of these other problems like fraud and corruption as well.”
-
@Musa_alGharbi
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"The human psyche was designed primarily to solve *social* problems within its own species, not physical and mathematical puzzles, as educational tests and some concerns of philosophers might cause us to believe."
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"[W]itnessing violence was not actually considered to be a trauma in the past. Public executions once attracted large groups of spectators who enjoyed observing torture and death."
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If you could teach a course on a single philosophy book published in the last 10 years, what would you choose?
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"the frequency of research misconduct, data fabrication, reproducibility crisis, paper mills, predatory journals, citation manipulations, peer-review biases, and paper retractions are alarming and appear to be rising"
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Love the affable clarity of this cool new paper by Peter DeScioli...
"Indeed, humans have powerful motives to control the laws, which we have only just begun to uncover. They are probably as strong as our motives for status and alliances."
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"We found men were much more likely than women to be at the extreme ends of the behavioural spectrum"
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"We argue that the currently available evidence does not support a clear link between beliefs generated or reinforced through misinformation and aberrant behavior. The dynamics of belief formation are far more complicated."
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"rapid cultural dynamics of moral norms [N] seem far better explained by rivalrous agents opportunistically seeking allies to jockey for self-advantageous N), than by the slow accumulation of group-benefiting N through some groups doing better than others"
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"Do I feel bad that over the years I trashed both of [Kahneman's] pop-science books [...]? No. But do I think that overall he still had a positive effect on the public understanding of science? Also no."
-
@StuartJRitchie
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"our evolved psychology could indeed explain why we are not prone to study our evolved psychology"
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"As we see it, minimizing the magnitude of important sex differences and discounting their biological origins can be just as damaging (for science and society at large) as exaggerating them and accepting simplistic biological explanations of sex differences at face value."
New co-authored PT blog post...eight “Counterpoints” to Fine and colleagues’ original “things you need to know” about sex differences
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"a large body of literature in psychology and the social sciences has shown that individual traits are not easily shaped by proselytizing, propaganda, or advertising"
Cognitive fossils: using cultural artifacts to reconstruct psychological changes throughout history
Review by Nicolas Baumard, Lou Safra, Mauricio Martins, & Coralie Chevallier
@MauJDMartins
@CoralieChevall1
Free access until December 28:
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"left-wing authoritarianism correlates positively with the need for chaos and belief in science and negatively with institutional trust"
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"The simple fact of the matter is that not a single scientific study has demonstrated that beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation have, generally, increased over time."
-Enders &
@JoeUscinski
@knightcolumbia
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"Nearly all nations preferred to spare women over men. However, this difference was more pronounced in countries where women had better prospects for good health and survival."
Worldwide study (N = 40 million) of self-driving car ethics sheds light on similarities and differences in the degree cultures value human and non-human animal lives.
@medialab
@PsychToday
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"the fact that solitary reasoning typically resorts to imagining a dialogue (just as solitary sexuality typically resorts to imagining interactive sex) underscores [...] that reason not only performs social functions [...] but actually evolved to do so"
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"Most poor kids don’t take the SAT or any other standardized test. More should, and it would help if these tests were compulsory and free for them."
-
@robkhenderson
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"genocide and other forms of collective violence are not necessarily caused by weakening the perpetrators’ moral restraints against harming defenseless human beings, but by strengthening their justifications for doing so"
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"[N]o psychologist or social scientist, who lacks a detailed understanding of kin selection theory, and an awareness of the importance of relatedness throughout the living world, can claim to be an expert on behaviour." -
@SteveStuWill
Fantastic article by
@SteveStuWill
via
@NakedScientists
on why we tend to favour relatives over non-relatives
#evopsych
#theapethatunderstoodtheuniverse
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"All you have to do is notice the invigoration you feel when you believe that someone has really understood you during a good convo, or the tension & distress you feel after an argument, or how little sleep you get during a period of romantic strife"
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"microaggressions...weak measurement & an undue reliance on lived experience... IAT is a flawed measure...nobody has convincingly shown that patterns of reaction times actually reflect 'unc bias' (or 'implicit prejudice') as opposed 2 cultural stereotypes"
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"men are 10 times more likely than women to commit serial homicide with a sexual motive, and women are three times more likely than men to commit serial homicide with a financial/profit motive"
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"Many students and graduates of top universities are terrified of being seen as what they really are."
-
@robkhenderson
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"there is no empirical evidence that repressed memory exists... the evidence that people remember experienced trauma relatively accurately is overwhelming"
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"helps to solve the puzzle of why Americans are so convinced that misinformation is omnipresent despite its relatively low prevalence in their actual media diets: even people who have not directly encountered misinformation have likely seen media coverage of the issue"
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"The human mind is a remarkable contraption, great at keeping us psychologically buoyant in periods of chaos and allowing us to pay the price later, once the storm has settled."
Officially ONE MONTH left until my debut book is out ✍️🚀🤓
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"People's mild paranoia regarding their mate's fidelity plausibly functions as a reverse self-fulfilling prophesy, helping to bring about its own falsity. Thus, the fact that infidelity is relatively rare in our species doesn't imply that jealousy isn't needed."
The Ape That Understood the Universe author
@SteveStuWill
investigates the evolution of jealousy for
@sciencefocus
.
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😸 "It will be a source of amusement to future historians that prominent early 21st century psychologists denied the left could be as rigid and sanctimonious as the right."
-
@PTetlock
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1/2 "In short, the public is coming to know that universities have approved positions on certain topics, and thus is quite rationally reducing its confidence in research that comes out of them"
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"Can the cultural evolution of social technologies discover and retain adaptive solutions as effectively as the cultural evolution of material technologies? Here, we argue that it likely cannot."
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"Diagnostic literalism and explanatory reductionism have formed a vicious cycle of reification."
-
@EikoFried
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"Women report using nearly a dozen flirtatious behaviors to caution other women that a potential partner is theirs, all without necessarily uttering a word." -
@tjw51
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"Forty years of research on how people reason about novel possibilities reveals that the glorification of children’s imagination is misguided. Children are no more imaginative than adults. Quite often, they are less imaginative."
-
@andrewshtulman
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"...men’s preferences indicate that they are choosing partners who have reached puberty, but who have a maximum number of remaining reproductive years."
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"People of European origin and South Americans showed a higher level of sexual dimorphism in facial shape compared to people of African origin. Eye region—the shape and relative size of eyes and brows (supraorbital ridge)—differed the most between sexes."
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"As a naturalist feminist, I also think we must retain sex as a concept else we might as well discard evolutionary explanations (of anything) altogether--and that would be a huge mistake... suffice it to say that I stay silent because I am afraid of the consequences to my career"
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"Experts on gender and gender stereotyping were no more accurate in their estimates than non-experts. And the more committed that forecasters were to gender egalitarianism, the more they overestimated levels of gender bias!"
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