To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome

We start with the case of a woman who experienced unbearable tragedy. In 1899, this Parisian bride, Madame M., had her first child. Shockingly, the child was abducted and substituted with a different infant, who soon died. She then had twin girls. One grew into healthy adulthood, while the other, again, was abducted, once more replaced with a different, dying infant. She then had twin boys. One was abducted, while the other was fatally poisoned.

Madame M. searched for her abducted babies; apparently, she was not the only victim of this nightmarish trauma, as she often heard the cries of large groups of abducted children rising from the cellars of Paris.

As if all this pain was not enough, Madame M.’s sole surviving child was abducted and replaced with an imposter of identical appearance. And soon the same fate befell Madame M.’s husband. The poor woman spent days searching for her abducted loved ones, attempting to free groups of other abducted children from hiding places, and starting the paperwork to divorce the man who had replaced her husband.

 

Nautilus

The Psychological Research That Helps Explain The Election

At the end of most years, I’m typically asked to write about the best psychology papers of the past twelve months. This year, though, is not your typical year. And so, instead of the usual “best of,” I’ve decided to create a list of classic psychology papers and findings that can explain not just the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. but also the rising polarization and extremism that seem to have permeated the world. To do this, I solicited the opinion of many leading psychologists, asking them to nominate a paper or two, with a brief explanation for their choice. (Then I nominated some stories myself.) And so, as 2016 draws to a close, here’s a partial collection of the insights that psychology can bring to bear on what the year has brought about, arranged in chronological order.

New Yorker

The trick to not giving a terrible gift this year

When you’re buying gifts for people this holiday season, you might be thinking about how your loved ones will react the moment they open them. Will they be truly happy and thankful — or will you see disappointment flicker across their faces?

If you’ve given terrible gifts in the past, this focus on the moment of exchange might be why. A new paper that reviews decades of research on gift-giving suggests one common mistake people make is thinking too much about how recipients will react to their gift initially, rather than how it might benefit them in the long run.

Washington Post

How to Beat Procrastination

Procrastination comes in many disguises. We might resolve to tackle a task, but find endless reasons to defer it. We might prioritize things we can readily tick off our to-do list—answering emails, say—while leaving the big, complex stuff untouched for another day. We can look and feel busy, while artfully avoiding the tasks that really matter. And when we look at those rolling, long-untouched items at the bottom of our to-do list, we can’t help but feel a little disappointed in ourselves.

The problem is our brains are programmed to procrastinate. In general, we all tend to struggle with tasks that promise future upside in return for efforts we take now.That’s because it’s easier for our brains to process concrete rather than abstract things, and the immediate hassle is very tangible compared with those unknowable, uncertain future benefits. So the short-term effort easily dominates the long-term upside in our minds—an example of something that behavioral scientists call present bias.

How can you become less myopic about your elusive tasks? It’s all about rebalancing the cost-benefit analysis: make the benefits of action feel bigger, and the costs of action feel smaller. The reward for doing a pestering task needs to feel larger than the immediate pain of tackling it.

Harvard Business Review

How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.

The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.

“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA Internal Medicine paper.

NYTimes

From Bikinis to Burkinis, Regulating What Women Wear

In the midst of France’s fight over banning the burkini, the bikini is celebrating its 70th anniversary, and photographs chronicling its debut and early history in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s are on display in one of Paris’s chic galleries, prompting parallels to the uproar over the burkini today.

What is it about women’s swimwear and more generally women’s attire that over and over in history has attracted controversy and impelled societies to legislate or regulate women’s choices?

Historians, sociologists and anthropologists have argued about it for decades, but the seemingly simplistic statement that women’s bodies are a battleground has some truth to it. Formally or informally, men (primarily) have been making rules about women’s attire for a very long time.

“Can’t we decide what we want to wear in 2016?” wondered Sarah Fekih, 23, from Lyon, France, in a comment she wrote to The New York Times. “If one wishes to dress skimpily or to be almost nude or to be covered from head to toe, isn’t that a personal choice that can not be dictated by law?”

NYTimes

375 top scientists warn of ‘real, serious, immediate’ climate threat

Yesterday, 375 of the world’s top scientists, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, published an open letter regarding climate change. In the letter, the scientists report that the evidence is clear: humans are causing climate change. We are now observing climate change and its affect across the globe. The seas are rising, the oceans are warming, the lower atmosphere is warming, the land is warming, ice is melting, rainfall patterns are changing and the ocean is becoming more acidic.

These facts are incontrovertible. No reputable scientist disputes them. It is the truth.

Despite these facts, the letter reports that the US presidential campaign has seen claims that the earth isn’t warming, or it is only a natural warming, or that climate change is a hoax. These claims are false. The claims are made by politicians or real estate developers with no scientific experience. These people who deny the reality of climate change are not scientists.

The Guardian

A Single Migration From Africa Populated the World, Studies Find

Modern humans evolved in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago. But how did our species go on to populate the rest of the globe?

The question, one of the biggest in studies of human evolution, has intrigued scientists for decades. In a series of extraordinary genetic analyses published on Wednesday, researchers believe they have found an answer.

In the journal Nature, three separate teams of geneticists survey DNA collected from cultures around the globe, many for the first time, and conclude that all non-Africans today trace their ancestry to a single population emerging from Africa between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago.

“I think all three studies are basically saying the same thing,” said Joshua M. Akey of the University of Washington, who wrote a commentary accompanying the new work. “We know there were multiple dispersals out of Africa, but we can trace our ancestry back to a single one.”NYTimes

Cats crossed continents to be close to us, says gene study

Cats like to think they don’t need us, but a new study into feline genetics has indicated that the global kitty population only boomed when they moved in with humans. The research, presented last week and reported by Nature, seems to show two distinct waves of growth in cat numbers: first around 10,000 years ago as humans first started cultivating crops, and second as we started taking to the seas.

CAT FAMILIES FROM EGYPT ENDED UP IN BULGARIA

The researchers behind the study sequenced DNA from more than 200 cats of various generations discovered in tombs, burial sites, and other archaeological sites, from as far back as 15,000 years ago, to animals born in the 1700s. Even among this limited sample, they found links in mitochondrial DNA, genetic information passed down through the maternal line only — suggesting that cat families had either moved or been taken near to human civilizations. This mitochondrial connection was spotted between wild cats found in the Middle East and creatures discovered close to the fertile east Mediterranean, a region well-known for its early agriculture. Researchers also found connections between cats that lived millennia later, linking mummified kitties discovered in Egyptian tombs with cats found as far away as Bulgaria, Turkey, and sub-Sarahan Africa.

TheVerge

Turning off this newly discovered brain pathway could help us block fearful memories

Scientists now know how to make you forget your fears — at least if you’re a mouse. By turning off a newly discovered brain pathway, scientists were able to make mice lose their fear of a shock. It’s early research, but it may point toward methods that could help people with anxiety and PTSD.

After finding a new pathway in the brain important for creating fearful memories, scientists trained mice to fear a high-pitched tone by shocking the rodents every time they heard it, according to a study published today in Nature Neuroscience. They waited til the rodents would freeze in fear even without the shock before proceeding to the next stage: viewing the mouse brains. Using a specialized microscopy technique, the scientists observed that there was growth in the neurons along that pathway. So what would happen if they could turn that pathway off?

TheVerge