by Evan Lerner from Seed Magazine "Today, down in the descriptively named Research Triangle in North Carolina, more than 250 scientists, journalists, bloggers, programmers, and multi-hyphenated combinations thereof are planning the future of science communication on the web. (Practicing what it...

by Mike Barrowcliffe in Times Online "Professor Gail Heyman, of the University of California, questioned 130 students and their parents about parental lying. She was surprised to find that more than 80 per cent of parents lied at some point, even those who insisted to their children that it was...

In Medical News Today "Research by the University of Warwick and the University of Manchester finds that psychological therapy could be 32 times more cost effective at making you happy than simply obtaining more money. The research has obvious implications for large compensation awards in law courts...

by Nathan Heflick in Psychology Today "Feeling a little bit less in control? Research suggests you are more likely to believe in the controlling power of your government, and God. Aaron Kay (professor at The University of Waterloo) and colleagues have recently tested a model of compensatory control...

The "Reproducing Virtues" series has a new podcast on the place for the virtue of trust within economics. The series is described below: "In a few breathtaking months, we've culturally moved from seeing Wall Street as an icon of thriving civil society to discussing its workings with...

By Jonathan Zittrain | TED "The increasing proliferation of "tethered" devices, from iPhones to Xboxes, is only one of countless threats to the freewheeling Internet as we know it. There's also spam, malware, misguided legislation and a drift away from what Internet law expert Jonathan...

By Elizabeth Pennisi | Science Mag "Cooperation has created a conundrum for generations of evolutionary scientists. If natural selection among individuals favors the survival of the fittest, why would one individual help another at a cost to itself? Charles Darwin himself noted the difficulty of...

By William Saletan | Slate "Is it OK to impregnate a 60-year-old woman? Should old women have babies? Until recently, this wasn't an issue. Nature exhausted your egg supply, and that was it. But technology has surmounted that problem. Now you can get in vitro fertilization, donor eggs, and womb...

By: Tom Jacobs "Are rules made to be broken — or obeyed? Newly published research suggests your answer to that question depends largely upon whether you are mulling it over from a position of power. “In determining whether an act is right or wrong, the powerful focus on whether rules and principles...

By Katherine Harmon | Scientific American "If love is said to come from the heart, what about hate? Along with music, religion, irony and a host of other complex concepts, researchers are on the hunt for the neurological underpinnings of hatred. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun...

By Kochanska, Grazyna; Koenig, Jamie L.; Barry, Robin A.; Kim, Sanghag; and Yoon, Jeung Eun. Abstract: We investigated whether children's robust conscience, formed during early family socialization, promotes their future adaptive and competent functioning in expanded ecologies. We assessed two dimensions...

By Jessica R. Escobedoa and Ralph Adolphs Abstract: Our autobiographical self depends on the differential recollection of our personal past, notably including memories of morally laden events. Whereas both emotion and temporal recency are well known to influence memory, very little is known about how...

By Mark S. M. Scott John Hick transformed the shape of thinking about theodicy in contemporary philosophical theology with his conception of the world as a “vale of soul‐making.” Suffering, he argues, enables our development as spiritually and morally mature persons. Without suffering we could not cultivate...

By Robert Sparrow "Since the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artifact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of fetal sex via ultrasound along with the option of termination...

By Frans Svensson "Conceived of as a contender to other theories in substantive ethics, virtue ethics is often associated with, in essence, the following account or criterion of right action: VR: An action A is right for S in circumstances C if and only if a fully virtuous agent would characteristically...

Christopher Oveis, E.J. Horberg, Dacher Keltner Compassion and pride serve contrasting social functions: Compassion motivates care-taking behavior, whereas pride enables the signaling and negotiation of rank within social hierarchies. Across 3 studies, compassion was associated with increased perceived...

By Michelle Tichy, David W. Johnson, Roger T. Johnson, & Cary J. Roseth Abstract: We examined the effects of a constructive controversy compared with individualistic learning on 3rd, 4th, and 5th-grade students' (N = 56) moral development, ethical skills, academic achievement, and attitudes toward...

Maui Hudson Ethical review is an integral part of the process of developing research and considering issues associated with the production of knowledge. It is part of a system that primarily legitimises western traditions of inquiry and reinforces western assumptions about knowledge and its benefit to...

By Darcia Narvaez Recently, intuitionist theories have been effective in capturing the academic discourse about morality. Intuitionist theories, like rationalist theories, offer important but only partial understanding of moral functioning. Both can be fallacious and succumb to truthiness : the attachment...

Galen V. Bodenhausen Social psychological research is increasingly coming to grips with the complexity of social identity within the individual, both from the perspective of perceivers trying to form impressions and make judgments about multiply categorizable targets, as well as from the perspective...