Hey, good news for those of us who dwell on the past.  A new paper, "From What Might Have Been to What Must Have Been: Counterfactual Thinking Creates Meaning,"  published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, concludes that thinking about the paths not taken tends to make us feel better about the paths we did take. For subjects in the study, counterfactual thinking made their past choices seem fated rather than random. From the paper:

Considering how pivotal events and relationships might have unfolded differently solidifies their meaning and significance in one’s life. By considering what might have been, individuals construct life stories that are more meaningful.

And this matters because:

How people reflect on their past offers profound insight into the human...

Last week the Obama administration announced that it would publish a new measure of poverty in the United States. Amid all the hubbub over health care, this news didn't make a huge splash (though at least one commentator on the right saw it as evidence of a secret lefty agenda). But it's a big deal. The United States has been measuring poverty the same way since the mid-1960s--basically looking at people's income and the cost of food--and economists have argued for years that the method doesn't do a good job of reflecting who is actually in need.

The new measure takes into account the cost of basics like childcare and healthcare. How you define poverty affects...

A guy in a black jacket and sunglasses shows up at your door one Saturday morning. He explains that there's been a little snafu. Apparently your brain has been plugged into an experience machine and your entire life so far has been nothing but a computer program. He's very sorry. Then he asks whether you'd like to be unplugged.

That's the scenario cooked up by Felipe De Brigard, a philosophy graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (His paper "If you like it, does it matter if it's real?" was recently published in Philosophical Psychology. You can read it on his Web site.) It's a twist on the famous Experience Machine from Robert Nozick's

The social sciences are easier than the natural sciences, according to second graders.

Adults more or less agree. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology took a look at which disciplines children and adults thought were the most difficult to learn. For the most part, people of all ages think psychology is easy and physics is hard. That bias begins early and changes some, but not much, the older we get.

In one phase of the study, kindergartners, second graders, fourth graders, and college-age adults were asked to rank how hard it would be to learn certain disciplines on their own. Everyone said psychology would be the easiest. Interestingly, kindergartners thought that economics would be the hardest to learn on one's own, while adults thought it would be...

When I picked up Florin Diacu's new book Megadisasters: The Science of Predicting the Next Catastrophe, I immediately flipped to the chapter on earthquakes, for obvious reasons. I hoped that Diacu, a mathematician, would write that we are close to being able to pinpoint where and when earthquakes will happen and thus save countless lives.

But no. It seems that predicting earthquakes is more pseudo than science at this stage. In fact, some seismologists think we should stop trying to predict them altogether, likening the attempt to alchemy.  Others...

Over the weekend a new Osama bin Laden tape appeared in which bin Laden (or someone claiming to be him) takes credit, sort of, for the botched Christmas day airliner bombing. Why he's taking credit for screw-ups I don't know, but it's the first we've heard from him in a while, and so people are trying to figure out what it all means.

Coincidentally, my article just came out on the research of Flagg Miller, a linguistic anthropologist, who has spent several years listening to the personal audiotape collection of the al-Qaeda leader (you can hear a

The other day I was talking to someone about a concert I went to in the mid-nineties. As I was telling the story, I realized that I sounded ... old. At the time, the band in question (Pavement) was relatively new and hip; now it's a band that certain members of my generation still revere and younger people probably haven't heard of. Back then I cared quite a bit about new music. Now, not so much.

David Beer knows the feeling. He has also passed the three-decade threshold and  has more or less lost touch with popular culture. But for him it's a more pressing problem. He's a lecturer in sociology at the University of York in the U.K. and he often writes about popular culture. How can he do that when he's ceased to be, you know, cool?

Beer...

How do you persuade people to give to Haiti relief efforts? Texting donations has gotten a lot of attention, though questions have been raised about how quickly that money will get there. Former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were on the Sunday morning talk shows stressing the transparency of their fund. Wyclef Jean, the Haitian-born musician, read a statement on YouTube after it emerged that tax returns from his charity hadn't been filed on time, among other alleged shenanigans. 

The perceived credibility of a disaster-relief organization matters quite a bit, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of Twente in The Netherlands (the paper...

I haven't seen Armored, a new heist movie starring Matt Dillon and Laurence Fishburne. And, before it was released, neither did professional movie critics. Most of the time, studios screen movies early for critics so they'll have time to write reviews. But they kept Armored under wraps.

Studios usually refuse to screen movies they think will get bad reviews. Good reviews are, of course, ideal, but it's better to get no review than a bad one. Or so the thinking goes.

But is withholding a movie from critics really a good strategy? Yes, according to a paper presented at the recent American Economic Association meeting.

In fact, studios should probably do it more often. In the

Take a bunch of kids at a summer camp. Place some delicious-looking treats (Coke, Twix bars, M&Ms, cookies) on  a nearby table. Then tell the kids that they can't have any. This makes you either a) mean or b) a researcher conducting a field experiment on productivity and willpower.

Presumably the authors of a recent paper titled "Temptation at Work," presented at the American Economics Association meeting earlier this month, fit in the latter category. After exposing the kids to temptation, the researchers had them perform a paper-folding task, rewarding them for...