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A study of 1,000 men and women ages 18-23, “Nonmarital Romantic Relationships and Mental Health in Early Adulthood” by Robin Simon and Anne Barrett, finds that young men benefit more from a romantic relationship going well and suffer worse from the strain of a bad one, whereas young women benefit more from simply being in [...]
Archive for the ‘Social Psychology’ Category
Emotional Rollercoaster Relationships Harder On Young Men Than Young Women
June 18th, 2010 
Daniel Fincke 
Posted in Love, Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology 
Tags: Romantic Relationships, Young Men, Young Women 
No Comments »The Secret Powers Of Time
June 10th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Some interesting insights, but visually a blast to watch: Your Thoughts?
Posted in Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Sociology, Videos Tags: Philip Zimbardo, Time No Comments »Children Of Lesbians Did Better In Study Than Traditionally Raised Children
June 9th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos (author of Parenting in Planned Lesbian Families (UvA Proefschriften) have the authored the first longitudinal study to track the outcomes of children created through artificial insemination through their teenage years. The results? The authors found that children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — [...]
Differently Abled Or Simply More Virtuous In One Respect
June 4th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Earlier today, I made a post comparing the different routes which atheists and those with Asperger’s syndrome take to their naturalistic explanations of causes of events that more religiously inclined people tend to chalk up to supernatural agency. Whereas religious people would attribute an illness or finding their true love to the purposeful forces, like God’s [...]
A Little Evidence That Atheists and Theists Don’t “Simply Think Differently”
June 4th, 2010 Daniel Fincke In order to respond to certain misunderstandings based on this post’s original, provocative title (Do Atheists Just Have Asperger’s?) I have re-edited it and retitled it. There is now a new opening paragraph and extra concluding paragraphs. It is often suggested that the difference between theists and atheists might simply stem from differences in their naturally given [...]
Teen Werewolves
May 26th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Am I just getting older or are teens really becoming a whole lot less distinguishable from children? The wisdom of a teen werewolf: I don’t believe any one is just human. Everyone’s got something else mixed in with them, just they’ve got to actually look inside themselves to see what it is. Thanks to Brandy [...]
Posted in News, News Discussion, Pop Culture, Social Psychology, Videos Tags: John Marshall High School, San Antonio, Teen Werewolves, Teenager No Comments »Is Belief In Love Like Belief In God?
May 25th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Roger Friedland finds an interesting correlation between the two kinds of belief and examines its possible causes and implications: We found that belief in God has no impact on young people’s sex lives. College virgins are no more likely to believe in God than non-virgins. Even those who took a virginity pledge are not sexually [...]
Posted in God, Psychology, Sex, Social Psychology, Sociology Tags: Casual Sex, College Sex, Friends With Benefits, Love, Religion and Sex, Roger Friedland, Sex and Love, Teenage Sex 1 Comment »“Boy Renter” George Rekers’s Attempts To Modify A Boy’s Effeminacy
May 18th, 2010 Daniel Fincke By now, surely you know who George Rekers is—he was founding member of the Family Research Council and former officer for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), who lost that last job when he rented a boy through a website called “Rentboy.com” to “carry his luggage” (and give him nude massages). [...]
Posted in Fundamentalism, Homophobia, Homosexuality, LGBTQAA, Psychology, Religious Extremism, Social Psychology Tags: Behavior Modification, Ex-Gay Ministries, Ex-Gay Movement, Family Research Council, George Rekers, Hypocrisy, National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), Religious Hypocrisy, Social Engineering No Comments »Untangling The Language Of Racists Who Deny They’re Racists
October 25th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Sendai Anonymous pointed me to a really interesting sociological study by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva which attempts to shed light on the various contortions that “color blind” racists go through in an incoherent attempt to evade their racism while expressing their views. First, I document how whites avoid direct racial language while expressing their racial views. [...]
Posted in Racism, Social Psychology, Sociology Tags: Color Blind Racism, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Language, Racial Language, Semantics No Comments »The Predictive Power Of Game Theory
September 29th, 2009 Daniel Fincke In this clip from The Daily Show, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita discusses predicting world affairs using models based on game theory to an extraordinarily high degree of accuracy (twice that of the CIA by their own estimation). It’s really exciting stuff: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c Bruce Bueno [...]
Posted in Hilarious, Moral Psychology, Philosophy, Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Videos, World Affairs Tags: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Decision Theory, Game Theory, Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future No Comments »On Failing To Grasp How Competition Can Be Cooperative And How Cooperation Can Be Counter-Productive
September 23rd, 2009 Daniel Fincke Robin Hanson responds to work such as Frans de Waal’s which emphasizes the invaluable role that empathy and cooperation played in natural selection of humans by stressing that as good as cooperation might be, we are prone to making serious errors about what genuinely helpful cooperation entails in specific instances: The unstated moral behind most [...]
On Fulfilling Religious Impulses Both Within And Without Religion
September 5th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Peaceful Atheist is a richly written blog by a Wheaton grad who deconverted from Christianity while a student at the devoutly Evangelical school. Here are provocative thoughts which she formulated through the process of reviewing biological-anthropologist Barbara King’s Evolving God: In this broadest definition of religion, King includes the transcendent awareness that can be stimulated [...]
Character As Fate And Environment As Variability
August 21st, 2009 Daniel Fincke In reply to this post from late last night in which I took a first pass at trying to sketch out my views on fate, George writes: Dan, Again I find myself thanking you for this blog. Good blogging is all for naught without good readers (and especially without good readers who contribute excellently and [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Social Psychology, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: Determinism, Fate, Free Will, Nature vs. Nurture, Oeidpus Rex, Philosophy of Personal Identity, Psychological Determinism, Psychology of Action, Robert Solomon, Self 9 Comments »Are Sex and Morality Merely “Evolutionary Tricks”?
August 1st, 2009 Daniel Fincke Francis Collins trots out a familiar old argument against atheism. The argument is that if there is no God then our morality is an illusion. Collins’s presentation of this argument features an unusual and suspicious spin. Collins knows that arguments can be made from evolutionary psychology that broadly moral thinking seems to have evolved in [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Contemporary Ethics, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Francis Collins, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Psychology, Religion, Sex, Social Psychology, Sociobiology Tags: Altruism, Charles Manson, Social Virtues, Sociopaths 3 Comments »An Argument For Gay Marriage And Against Traditionalism
July 27th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I am puzzled by appeals to history to oppose gay marriage because history is only the story of what people have done and never of itself directly tells us anything about right or wrong. Results of history can serve as warnings about effective and uneffective approaches to goal x or goal y but what people [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Autonomy, Civil Rights, Cultural Secularism, Culture, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Gay Marriage, Homosexuality, Jesus, Metaethics, Moral Psychology, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Political Secularism, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Religious Secularism, Same Sex Marriage, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Social Psychology, Sociobiology, Sociology, Virtues Tags: Attractions, Aversions, Beauty, Civil Unions, Definition of Marriage, Disgust, Gay Adoption, Homophobia, Irrational Moral Judgments, John Richardson, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, King David, Michel Foucault, Misogyny, Nathan The Prophet, Nietzsche, Polygamy, Separate But Equal, Socrates, Traditionalism, Ugliness 12 Comments »10 Basics Of Group Dynamics
July 19th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Go here for the explanations of each of the 10 basic “psych 101″ points and also to find further articles on the topic. I found point 6 most interesting and so included it in full below: 1. Groups can arise from almost nothing 2. Initiation rites improve group evaluations 3. Groups breed conformity 4. Learn [...]
Posted in Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Sociology Tags: Change, Competition, Conformity, Gossip, Group Psychology, Group Think, Initiation Rites, Leadership, Persuasion, Trust No Comments »Is God Needed For Us To Care About Starving Kids A World Away?
July 19th, 2009 Daniel Fincke A few weeks ago now, I wrote a post, Commitment To Value Without God, in which I discussed how even when I was a Christian, I realized that I did not need to make reference to God in order to either psychologically recognize the value of sumptuous food or good friendship or any of various [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Cultural Secularism, Education, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Psychology, Philosophy, Problem of Evil, Psychology, Religion, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Sociobiology, Sociology, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: Africa, Colonialism, Compassion, Hell, In-group/Outgroup Psychology, Joshua Greene, Joshua Knobe, Nihilism, Peter Singer, Poverty, Starvation No Comments »Female Performance Anxiety?
July 18th, 2009 Daniel Fincke A week ago we pointed readers to a study that provided evidence women tend to psyche out when they think they are playing chess against men and perform worse than they are capable. Here Laura Woodhouse from thefword.org shares her own anecdotes about underperforming at tasks when she is around men. She finds herself [...]
Posted in Feminism, Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Sciences, Sociology Tags: Women No Comments »Palin As Figurehead
July 3rd, 2009 Daniel Fincke The other day I quoted one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers who attributed Sarah Palin’s popularity among fundamentalists to the fact that they and she are both fundamentally liars who have to refuse reality to sustain their beliefs. I used this remark for a launching pad for discussing Nietzsche’s critique of theologians as fundamentally deceitful and [...]
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