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Welcome to Weekend Tidbits!
Check in every weekend for a couple of interesting facts that you may or may not already know. If not, hopefully you learned something. If so, what are your thoughts on the subject? Got your own...
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Children Who Can Delay Gratification Tend to Become More Successful
An experiment was run by Walter Mischel with four-year-olds back in the 1960s. Each child was brought into a room in which there was an Oreo cookie. The child was told that s/he could have the Oreo...
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Eating Helps You Test Better
Evidently, when you are thinking about a problem, you use up glucose. This can be seen by monitoring blood glucose as people work on math problems and the like. Roy Baumeister conducted an experiment...
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Today's Tidbit: Proper Penmanship and Prose Will Make You More Trustworthy
People were shown a bunch of writing purporting to make various claims about facts about the world, then were asked later which facts they believed. It turns out when the writing was written in better...
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Today's Tidbit: Want Bigger Tips? Draw Eyes on Your Tip Jar
In an office area, there is a coffee machine and a jar in which people are asked to put voluntary contributions for the coffee they consume. There is a picture above the jar. Each week the picture is...
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Today's Tidbit: Believe Your Own Lies and Everyone Will Believe Them Too
Numerous studies have shown that people are over-confident in their own abilities. Most people, for example, think that they are better drivers than average. This doesn't make any sense because surely...
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Today's Tidbit: Want to Be Happier? Don't Eat Junk Food
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that motivates us to engage in rewarding activities such as eating and sex. Animals without dopamine stop eating and starve to death. Certain drugs are able to activate...
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Today's Tidbit: Candy Can Help You Curb "That Time of the Month"
When subjects are asked to watch a movie and not display emotions (say, a comedy without laughing, or a tearjerker without crying), they evidently use up glucose in particular areas of their brain in...
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Today's Tidbit: Sea Otters Help Us Fight Global Warming
Sea otters are the largest members of the weasel family. When people started hunting sea otters for their fur, their population fell from roughly 225,000 to about 1,500, until the International Fur...
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Today's Tidbit: If You Like It Hot and Dry Outside, Eat Meat
It takes roughly 500 gallons of water to produce a quarter pound hamburger, and in the process, approximately six pounds of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. By contrast, to produce a...
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Today's Tidbit: Politicians Never Forget a Face, Just Like Fuscatus Wasps
Constructive social interaction depends upon recognizing those one is interacting with. Not surprisingly, then, we have a section of our cortex devoted to facial recognition. But we're not the only...
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Today's Tidbit: Stay Off the Twinkies and Become a Better Person
Remember Dan White's "Twinkie defense" in 1979? Well it turns out that the the ability to convert food into glucose is correlated with the ability to control oneself. According to one study, 90% of...
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Today's Tidbit: If You Want to Live Longer, Get a Rocketship
According to special relativity, if a twin leaves earth in a high-speed rocket, goes out into space, and then returns to earth, he will return younger than his twin who stays home. This is because,...
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Today's Tidbit: People Like Pain More Than Pleasure
There is a ton of evidence that people find a loss from whatever their reference point is more painful than they find pleasure in a gain of the same magnitude. Here is one example. Devin Pope and...
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Today's Tidbit: More Is Less
There are two sets of baseball cards: A = Contains 7 top players. B = Contains the same 7 top players, plus 3 so-so players. There are also three groups of people who are going to bid on them: Shown...
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Today's Tidbit: Ingesting Cat Poop Might Make You Crazy
The cat virus Toxoplasma gondii produces psychotic symptoms in cats similar to those in humans suffering from schizophrenia. Moreover, recent studies by Jaroslav Flegr show that exposure to cats in...
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Today's Tidbit: Thoughtful Christmas Gifts Are Cherished, Good Deals Get...
As we approach the holiday (i.e. gift-giving) season, don't forget to make sure to include the usual notes in your gifts indicating that they can be returned. Otherwise, you'll just cause the...
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Today's Tidbit: Statistics Beat Taste Buds
As discussed in a previous tidbit, people are over-confident in their abilities for many reasons. Here's an example... The price of wine varies enormously by vintage. There is a HUGE industry in...
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Today's Tidbit: Know Your Limitations
Dianne Tice and Roy Baumeister gave a bunch of college students a questionnaire in which the students answered questions about their work habits. In a class which she taught, Tice also assigned a...
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Today's Tidbit: Later Is Less Stressful Than Never
Nicole Mead and Vanessa Patrick had a bunch of dieters, one at a time, sit and watch a movie, each with a bowl of candy next to him. Some were told they shouldn't eat the candy, while others were told...
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