Word: papering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Typically, scientists use animals to study a new theory before they try it out in humans. But sometimes they go in the opposite direction, using animals to see whether certain theories apply only to humans. A new paper in Science does exactly that, investigating whether a widely documented human phenomenon - the fact that we tend to prefer people who behave the same way we do in social interactions - exists in other species...
...turns out it does. Adhering to the old saying "monkey see, monkey do," monkeys in the study appeared to favor those who mimicked them - even when the imitator was a member of another species (Homo sapiens). The authors of the paper, Annika Paukner of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Animal Center and her colleague Pier Ferrari as well as two Italian researchers, structured the study this way: two experimenters, each holding a small plastic ball, faced each monkey in its cage (10 monkeys in all participated). The monkey was given an identical ball. One of the experimenters imitated whatever...
...Adam Smith to describe the psychological act of putting yourself in someone else's shoes and experiencing their feelings - you wouldn't do that unless you were after some sort of social bond. Some years later, in 1999, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published an influential paper showing how socially bonding the act of mimicking can be, even when people aren't aware they're being imitated. In the study, psychologists Tanya Chartrand, who is now at Duke, and John Bargh, who is now at Yale, asked college students to describe a set of photographs...
...entire city of John Dillingers, feeling guiltless for stealing from the banks. Boemio is well aware that short selling isn't ethical and is exacerbating Vegas' economic problems. People, she believes, should make their payments, accept their paper losses and ride out the crash. "Guess what, a______s of Las Vegas. That's what gambling is about. That's what investing is about," she says. "It's greedy. But we're all doing it. Because why not?" It's very hard, she says, to suffer as the one honest person in a town of successful con artists...
...like Henri Matisse, in a wheelchair in his 80s, who continued to create art - cutting out bits of colored paper, painting with his brush in his mouth, supervising his decoration of the Chapel of the Rosary in St.-Paul de Vence because it was what he did, because it kept him alive. That's why Les Paul continued to play weekly gigs at Iridium well into his 90s, until shortly before his death, putting the final touches, grace notes, on the edifice of his achievement. Each Monday evening, two legends would fill that tiny stage: a living legend, Les Paul...