Word: effect
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...test the effect of social influence on eating habits, researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, 95 undergraduate women were individually invited to a lab ostensibly to participate in a study about movie viewership. Before the film began, each woman was asked to help herself to a snack of either M&M's or granola. Another "participant," who was actually an actor hired by the research team, grabbed her food first, in full view of the subjects at the snack line. In her natural state, the phony participant weighed 105 lb. and wore a size 0. But in about half...
...information when making decisions, in this case the habits of the actor. The social environment is extremely influential. If this fellow study subject is going to take an above-average number of M&M's, so will I. Call it the "I'll have what she's having" effect. (See pictures of what makes you eat more food...
...risk of creating a situation where it never goes away. If a tax credit - or any other economic benefit - sticks around long enough, people start feeling entitled to it, even if it was originally supposed to be temporary. In academic literature this is called the endowment effect. Taking away such a program once it's ingrained can be a monumental political challenge. It's not just that expanding the home-buyer tax credit would cost $50 billion to $100 billion this year. It's that it could easily wind up costing that every year...
...form of lower IQ. Straus, who is 83 and has been studying corporal punishment since 1969, found that kids who were physically punished had up to a five-point lower IQ score than kids who weren't - the more children were spanked, the lower their IQs - and that the effect could be seen not only in individual children but across entire nations as well. Among 32 countries Straus studied, in those where spanking was accepted, the average IQ of the survey population was lower than in nations where spanking was rare, the researcher says. (See nine kid foods to avoid...
...orphaned at 9 when her father, a Greek immigrant and cook, died of a heart attack a year after her mother succumbed to cancer. What drives her as much as anything else is the perspective that comes from representing a small, relatively poor state where the principal effect of well-intentioned, piecemeal efforts at health reform has been to ignite an explosion in medical costs. Maine, whose insurance market is dominated by one large firm, pays some of the highest premiums in the country, and they are rising nearly four times as fast as wages are. Much of that...