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...study reconfirms the notion that imitation is not uniquely human (past research has also shown that apes and monkeys easily recognize when they are being copied), and that our affinity for it may have roots in our evolution. What has never been precisely understood, though, is why we like to be parroted so much. One theory is that mimicry somehow promotes safety in groups of animals by binding them together - that mimicry is a kind of social glue. (Read what fat-bellied monkeys tell us about our own social stress...
Five years after Chartrand and Bargh's paper was published, a team of Dutch researchers expanded on the findings in an article in Psychological Science. The Dutch team not only replicated the earlier research but also found that people become more altruistic after they have been imitated. Mimicked participants in the Dutch study, which was conducted in the same way as the Chartrand and Bargh study, were willing to help a researcher who had "accidentally" dropped some pens 84% of the time; those in the control group helped pick up the pens only 48% of the time. The Dutch team...
...Diarrhea has been ignored for decades. For many people outside Africa, the continent's calamitous health problems are largely defined by two epidemics: AIDS and malaria. There is a World AIDS Day and a World Malaria Day, and countless medical researchers work to combat the two diseases. In 2008 about 60% of the world's funding for research into major epidemics went to AIDS and malaria; diarrhea received a tiny fraction in comparison. Just 4% of all U.S. funding for research into major developing-world epidemics in 2007 went to diarrhea. The European Commission has given about $1.33 billion...
These cash-for-clunkers efforts appear to be working well as an economic stimulus, although they've lost some of their environmental benefit. Research has shown that the greenest (and most equitable) plans target the oldest gas guzzlers and allow consumers to spend the money however they want...
...than $25,000 so far. (Other sources of funds: posters and promotional DVDs sold to supporters for twenty cents each.) "Bashardost has campaigned very effectively, traveling around the country, reaching out to the poor as a populist on a bicycle," says Haroun Mir, director of the Afghan Center for Research and Policy Studies. "But no one believes he could ever be elected...