In this age of Ted Haggard, the question is an obvious one: To what extent are homophobic sexually attracted to other men? This January 2009 Scientific American article explores the research regarding these two variables. There appears to be a correlation.
Today I read a 2005 Scientific American article that discussed why so many innocent people confessed to committing crimes.
The pages of legal history reveal many tragic miscarriages of justice involving innocent men and women who were prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced to prison or to death. Opinions differ on prevalence rates, but it is clear that a disturbing number of cases have involved defendants who were convicted based only on false confessions that, at least in retrospect, could not have been true. Indeed, as in the case of the Central Park incident, disputed false confessions have convicted some people notwithstanding physical evidence to the contrary. As a result of technological advances in forensic DNA typing--which enables the review of past cases in which blood, hair, semen, skin, saliva or other biological material has been preserved--many new, high-profile wrongful convictions have surfaced in recent years, up to 157 in the U.S. alone at the time of this writing.
Typically 20 to 25 percent of DNA exonerations had false confessions in evidence. Why would an innocent person confess to a crime? A scan of the scientific literature reveals how a complex set of psychological factors comes into play . . . [One of those factors is the tendency] toward compliance or suggestibility in the face of two common interrogation tactics--the presentation of false incriminating evidence and the impression that giving a confession might bring leniency. In short, sometimes people confess because it seems like the only way out of a terrible situation.
What remains of conservatism today? Andrew Sullivan, who characterizes himself as a classical conservative, takes an ax to what so often goes by the name of "conservatism" today. Below is an excerpt. You'll find Sullivan's thoughtful article over at the Daily Dish:
In contemporary America, the right is now in an almost parodic state of ideology. There isn't just a rigid set of beliefs, indifferent to any time or place (e.g. tax cuts are right in a boom and a recession, in surplus and debt); it is supported by a full-fledged organization or "movement"; this "movement" generates journals and magazines and blogs designed fundamentally to buttress the cause; and the most salient distinction discussed in these circles is between those who are for the cause and those against it (with particular scorn for any dissidents). There is, for good measure, always an enemies list, to maintain morale: the dreaded libruls! New leaders emerge because small groups of the ideological intelligentsia select them on the grounds of their conformance with the ideology - Palin and Jindal spring to mind. Or previously rational figures have to convert to full obedience to the tenets of the new faith if they are to become proper "conservatives" - McCain, Romney, two otherwise capable figures turned into hollow shells by the need to kowtow to fanatics. The final phase of this ghastly cycle is the Limbaugh-Coulter phase, in which nothing is left of the conservative cat, except a preening narcissism-as-entertainment grin.
This is a comment in the February/March 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind - Letters section. The author is "identified as Farlo":
[W]hy do we perceive death to be different from prebirth or, more precisely, pre-conception? That is also a time when our brain is not functioning--when it does not exist. Yet we do not spend nearly as much time pondering what happened to us or where our minds were before we were born.
Penn and Teller's explanation of sleight of hand is delightful. You get the whole lecture in about three minutes. As entertaining as this video is, it could also serve to remind us of a set of principles by which humans deceive each others through fallacious and misleading arguments. Because we are creatures of limited attention and growing fatigue, we are vulnerable to cognitive misdirection much as we are vulnerable to prestidigitation. For more on human attentional limitations, see here. Further, I have given considerable thought to the idea that much human decision-making could be explained in terms of attentional limitations. For more, see this paper I wrote in 1996.