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January 02, 2018

From Harper's:
Racists in the United States support free-speech rights for racist speech, but not for speech critical of their co-workers or the police.

From The Economist:
Affluent parents intensively nurture their children for success; the offspring of less fortunate homes fall far behind before they ever set foot in a school.

From The Economist:
Helpfully, some European countries have begun to offer civil unions for heterosexuals. (Gay couples already had that option.) They confer nearly all the rights of marriage but entail less of the intimidating hoopla. These now account for a fifth of new formal unions in the Netherlands, and more in some working-class districts. They have not undermined marriage so far. It is a small fix for a huge problem, but it might help.

From The Guardian (John Banville on "The book that changed my life/the world"):
The Catechism of the Catholic Church. It had all the answers; it told you what simony is, and why you will go to hell for indulging in concupiscence. If only it were all true …

From Journal of Experimental Social Psychology:
Being observed by others fosters honest behavior. In this study, we examine a very subtle eye signal that may affect participants' tendency to behave honestly: observed pupil size. For this, we use an experimental task that is known to evoke dishonest behavior. Specifically, participants made private predictions for a coin toss and earned a bonus by reporting correct predictions. Before reporting the (in)correctness of their predictions, participants viewed videos of partners with dilating or constricting pupils. As dilating pupils are generally perceived positively, we expected that dishonesty would be reduced when participants look into the eyes of a partner with dilating pupils, especially when their own pupil size mimics the observed pupil size. In line with this prediction, Experiments 1 and 2 showed that, when earning a bonus meant harming the interaction partner, dishonesty occurred less frequently when the partner's pupils dilated rather than constricted. That is, when the interests of the self and the other conflict, participants use the pupil of the partner as a social cue to inform their behavior. However, pupil mimicry was not observed. In Experiment 3, we examined pupil mimicry and dishonesty in a context where there was no temptation to hurt the partner. Here, pupil mimicry between partners was observed, but there were no effects of the partner's pupil on dishonesty. Thus, when dishonesty harms the interaction partner, participants use pupillary cues from their partner to inform their behavior. Pupil mimicry, however, is bound to non-competitive contexts only.
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