How I almost ate a worm.

Worms are fascinating critters.  There’s no getting around it.  Or maybe they’ve just seemed fascinating, ever since I first read Gary Larson’s hilarious 1999 book, There’s a hair in my dirt!  A Worm’s Story. 

Now, though, worms have made it to the big screen.  Last week I took my two young children to a movie called “How to Eat Fried Worms.”  We all enjoyed the movie, which provided some lessons on eating earthworms, as well as a lesson or two on getting along.  Click here for more information on the movie, which features a large cast of youngsters, along with Tom Cavanagh and Kimberly Williams.

There’s an interesting side story here. I was surprised that the book on which the movie is based has been the target of censors: 

Because of the novel’s content, the idea of eating worms as part of a bet is thought to be disgusting by some, it has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 at number ninety six.

Amazing, eh?  But back to the main topic of my post. I’d like to tell you the story about how I ate worms . . . but I can’t.  I didn’t even come close. 

Watching “How to Eat Fried Worms” reminded me of the time I was visiting Guangzhou, China in 2001 with my wife and our newly adopted daughter.  We were traveling with a large group …

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Why Americans think Democrats are weak

Take a look at this Ellis Weiner post on Huffpo. His main point?  He claims that something has been long overlooked, despite its current obviousness: The reason Americans think the Democratic Party is "weak on terror" or "weak on security" is because Democrats don't stand up to Republicans. Could anything…

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Will money make you happy? Beware the focusing effect!

Erika’s post regarding Psychology’s Top Blunders brought to mind another pitfall to those who do psychology. One aspect of Erika is post is that priming can corrupt the results of projection testing. This reminded me of an article I recently read regarding attempts to measure how “happy” people are. The article is “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion.”  I found the article in the June 30, 2006 edition of Science (http://www.sciencemag.com/ -available only to subscribers online).

Experimenters have often tried to find how satisfied someone is with his or her life, but such questions elicit a global evaluation. People tend to exaggerate the importance of a single factor on their overall well-being. The authors refer to this as the “focusing illusion.” This illusion can be the source of error in personal decision-making. 

Here’s an example. First, assume the experimenter asks these two questions in this order: 1) “How happy are you with your life in general?” and 2) “How many dates did you have last month?” In this case, there is no statistical correlation between the two questions. When you reverse the order of this questioning, however, the correlation becomes highly significant. “The dating question evidently caused that aspect of life to become salient and its importance to be exaggerated when the respondents encountered the more general question about their happiness.” The authors indicate that these focusing effects have also been observed when the respondent’s attention is first directed to their marriage or health.…

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Psychology’s top blunders, part one.

I don’t like the magazine Psychology Today. Instead of presenting the latest psychological findings in a layman-friendly format, the monthly instead peddles relationship advice and thinly-veiled book advertisements. So while I wouldn’t recommend a subscription to anyone (you’d better serve yourself by subscribing to a division of the APA), the magazine did feature one article in February 2005 that piqued my interest: Psychology’s Top Ten Misguided Ideas.

Composed by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies Director Dr. Robert Epstein, the ten-part list includes many psychological buzzwords and memes that the pop psych crowd (like most Psychology Today readers) still consider legitimate. I’d like to discuss a portion of Epstein’s list below:

1. Projective Tests

The popular images of psychology and psychiatry have a few iconic mainstays. You know the therapist cliché: a patient laid on a long couch, rambling about childhood trauma to a near-silent facilitator scribbling away. In nearly equal footing, many people associate projective tests, such as word association and Rorschach ink blots, with legitimate psychology.

The logic behind projective tests says that a therapist can quickly dig into a client’s preoccupations and mindset based on their knee-jerk responses to ambiguous things. This assumes that a patient would always see the same thing in the same ink blot; a sex addict would always recall lewd scenes; a veteran with Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder would always recognize carnage.

But projective tests neglect the effect of priming entirely. A wide variety of psychological studies have demonstrated that earlier access …

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Oddly, the “J” in ACLJ is not for Jesus

Although it looks something like the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), the ACLJ (American Center for Law and Justice) is a dba for Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, Inc. These two similar acronyms are often on opposite sides of issues, although both claim to be about supporting free speech. One of…

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