Altruistic Bacteria

How resistance to antibiotics can develop within a population.

Oliver Sacks on the Record

What he says about science and religion.

How Unselfish Should We Be?

Craig Parks answers.

Daily Links

Our resilience in times of trauma, the “environmentalist’s paradox,” the two scientists behind the lawsuit that halted federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, and more.

Kudos, Francis Collins

From Jerry Coyne.

The Poorest Countries Are the Most Religious

But the United States is an outlier.

Should Doctors Have to Disclose Their Religious Beliefs (or Lack Thereof)?

Clive Seale answers.

The Highs and Lows of Social Relationships

New findings show they impact us more than personal achievements won or lost.

Daily Links

Do spouses start off the same or grow more alike? What is metabiology? And more.

http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/blogs/heatherwax

BQO will delve into the big questions of human purpose and ultimate reality, with a focus on science, religion, economics, and ethics. We’ll be a part of something bigger—and we’re excited to join the other bloggers and esteemed group of columnists—but we’ll continue to explore the intersection of science and religion in the same way we always have.

The posts and comments on this site will stay up for the time being. While for now you won’t be able to receive our new posts via an email news feed, our Facebook and Twitter pages won’t change, and I’ll be posting lots more stuff there as the blog transitions. (Click here to become a fan on Facebook and here to follow us on Twitter.) You can still reach me at heather@scienceandreligiontoday.com.

We hope you’ll move with us, and be sure to update your bookmarks and blogrolls with our new address:

http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/blogs/heatherwax

Thanks for all your support,
Heather Wax

An ingroup is a social group an individual belongs to, feels associated with, and expresses loyalty to. Common ingroups are people from the same gender, ethnicity, or religion, but also one’s friends, family members, colleagues, or classmates. Ingroups have a large impact on decision-making behavior by the individual: People are inclined to conform to the attitudes and behaviors of ingroup members and tend to privilege ingroup members over outsiders. This effect is strong and even present when an ingroup is artificially created. For instance, the categorization of people into two groups based on a trivial criterion, such as birth date or T-shirt color, is sufficient to establish an ingroup bias in behavior.

Celebrities are not part of our ingroup as they typically belong to a different group than we do. Instead, celebrities are part of a group an individual wants to belong to, a so-called “aspirational group.” They are public figures who, for many, provide a standard of achievement and serve as a role model. Given this, celebrities are of great interest for marketers and they are often used for commercial purposes. Indeed, celebrity endorsement appears to be an effective way to advertise a product, but only if consumers identify the celebrity presenter as having technical knowledge about the advertised product or as being an experienced user of it.

We asked ourselves why fame has such a strong persuasive effect on consumer decision making and measured the brain’s response to celebrity endorsements. Neural activity in a brain region important for positive emotions and the learning of associations indicated that during just one exposure, positive affect was transferred from the celebrity to the product. This positive affect seemed to originate from the retrieval of memories associated with the celebrity. Whether the same mechanism of persuasion underlies the influence of (real) ingroup members on individual behavior is a question we’d like to answer by future research.

Mirre Stallen is a doctoral candidate at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University.

Accents Influence How Truthful People Sound
Researchers in Chicago have shown that people with a noticeable accent are considered less credible than those with no accent. The stronger the accent, the less credible the speaker. (Elizabeth Weise, USA Today)

More on China’s Religious Boom
The biggest boom of all has been in Christianity, which the government has struggled to control. One way it has tried to do that is by establishing government-sanctioned churches. (Louisa Lim, NPR)

Beauty Burden?
Few studies have examined the perils of beauty, or the upside of ordinary stock. But those that do offer some interesting reminders—above all, that beauty, like wealth, is both a blessing and a curse. (Tony Dokoupil, Newsweek)

Natural Selection in the Recent Past
In the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress. (Nicholas Wade, The New York Times)

In Praise of the New Atheists
The Rev. Michael Dowd: The New Atheists, I suggest, are not enemies of religion; they are modern-day prophets. Prophets traditionally were those who chastised their people for having fallen out of sync with their time, with “God’s ways.” “Come into right relationship with Reality,” they warned, “or perish!” (Orlando Sentinel)

Violence as Entertainment
Violent sports, movies, and games enjoy popularity and profitability because of the excitement and “forbidden fruit” factor, say psychology experts. (Madison Park, CNN)

Billboard Battle
Deep in the heart of the Bible Belt, a dispute over God and country is being waged very publicly. (Dan Harris and Enjoli Francis, ABC News)

THEATER
Imagining Madoff
Two months after Elie Wiesel used legal threats to shut down a play that imagined his relationship with his former money manager, Bernard Madoff, that work—revised, with a new character replacing Wiesel—will have its first performances this week. (Patrick Healy, The New York Times)

We have gotten great results from our experiments. They are as good as or better than the polygraph, and we are still in the early stages of this innovative new method to determine if someone is trying to deceive you.

when we are choosing between two or more very similar options, we tend NOT to take into account the consequences of not deciding. … a friend of mine spent three months choosing between two different cameras, only to miss countless photo opportunities that he will never get back. And given how similar the two cameras were, he might have been better off simply flipping a coin.

Ariely has also created the “At a boy!” app, which pays you a compliment every time you tap the screen. To help him figure out which comments make people feel best, he asks users to rate them using the thumbs up/thumbs down feature. You can also submit compliments that will be given to other people. According to Ariely, “not only are we sensitive to rude remarks from strangers, but we are also very excited when we get kind words, even if they are just random; they just make us feel much better, even if these strangers don’t know us very well.”