Word: behaviorism
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...make fun of broadcaster Chris Berman's attempts to hit on women at ESPN's ESPY Awards. Wilson thought twice about his comments later, but Tweleted preserved them. A quick glance over the deleted tweets of Twitter's top users reveals that most have been on their best behavior, though John Mayer apparently thought this little gem - "Wearing corduroy pants means having a nail file on you all the time" - was too inane even by Twitter's standards...
...forecasts: how a single number can quickly jump from an economist's spreadsheet to a politician's stump speech or a businessman's PowerPoint presentation. "Forecasts satisfy a deep psychological need that we live in a somewhat predictable and controllable world," says Philip Tetlock, a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "Those are essential stories. People just find the truth" - that the future is unknowable - "too dissonant...
...traders on Wall Street are taking advantage of the public backstop against systemic failure to create personal profits. "We want financial systems to be healthy," says Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary. But, he adds, "the President continues to have concerns that compensation will be based on risky behavior instead of performance." (Read "Obama Urges Congress Not to Block the Bailout...
...Swearing increases your pain tolerance," says Richard Stephens, a psychologist and lead author of the study, which was published this week in the journal NeuroReport. Although the experiment's initial hypothesis was inspired by anecdotal evidence from some pain researchers that swearing was actually a maladaptive behavior that served only to make things worse, Stephens' findings showed exactly the opposite. "The No. 1 priority is to make the pain go away. If [swearing] made the pain worse, that would be illogical," Stephens says, adding that you hardly need a scientific study to bear out the theory...
That's probably because humans are hardwired to swear cathartically, says Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and author of The Stuff of Thought, an exploration of the psychology of language. Pinker distinguishes cathartic cursing from using profanity descriptively, idiomatically, abusively or for emphasis, and points to similar behavior in animals that suggests its evolutionary roots. If you step on a dog or cat's tail, it will let out a sharp yelp of pain, for example. "Swearing probably comes from a very primitive reflex that evolved in animals," Pinker says. "In humans, our vocal tract has been hijacked...