“ ’Egocentricity’ in Adult Conversation,” is one of several studies featured in the article “Soft Is Hard: Psychologists Under the Bed — further evidence why the ‘soft’ sciences are the hardest to do well,” which is one of the articles in the special Numbers issue of the Annals of Improbable Research, which is one of […]
Tag: Soft Is Hard
It’s a Mess: Attempt to Connect the Messy Dots of Messy, Hard-to-Define Phenomena
What happens when you try to use new technological tools to measure and map things that are tough to define — so tough to define that people go half-crazy if they try to agree on the details of any of the definitions? The results can be messy, this paper suggests. Very messy: “Fledgling pathoconnectomics of […]
A Quick Take on Fast Walkers
Some scientists struggle to understand walking, as is evident in this study: “Walking Fast—Ranking High: A Sociobiological Perspective on Pace,” A. Schmitt and K. Atzwanger, Ethology and Sociobiology, vol. 17, no. 5, September 1996, pp. 451–62. The authors explain [AIR 15:5]: “We hypothesized that habitual fast walking might be a means to acquire and/or to […]
The Unhappiness of Handsome Husbands
“Beyond Initial Attraction: Physical Attractiveness in Newlywed Marriage,” James K. McNulty, Lisa A. Neff, and Benjamin R. Karney, Journal of Family Psychology, vol. 22, no. 1, February 2008, pp. 135–43. (Thanks to Ron Josephson for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, who are variously at University of Tennessee, University of Toledo, and University of […]