Phil Zimbardo died on October 14. His obituary is online. One of his lesser professional accomplishments came in 2003 when that year’s Ig Nobel Prize in psychology was awarded to Gian Vittorio Caprara, Claudio Barbaranelli, and Philip Zimbardo, for their report “Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities.” That study was published in Nature, vol. 385, February 1997, […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Politicians and ChatGPT — A few politicians seek success by being ultra-glib. In so doing, they achieve momentary plausibility. Feedback notices a similarity between those politicians’ shiny, hollow speech and the shiny, hollow text generated by […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Time for love — Valentine’s Day celebrates coupling. Alan McWilliam tells Feedback about an offer he received, before the most recent Valentine’s Day, from a US-based biotechnology company. It couples charm with other qualities. Alan says: “I […]
This new study gives a quick, iffy method to identify which country’s politicians appear to be bigly corrupt, or just plain bigly. The study is: “Obesity of Politicians and Corruption in Post‐Soviet Countries,” Pavlo Blavatskyy, Economic of Transition and Institutional Change, epub 2020. (Thanks to Gabriel Istrate for bringing this to our attention.) The author, […]