How power-hungry politicians divide and conquer

There's a reason people are "triggered" during voting time.

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  • People seeking to win an election often use emotional words to trigger voters.
  • These emotional words tend to trigger people into four different groups: loyalists, riled-up resisters, mild moderates, and disenchanted drop-outs.
  • What we see today is people getting into power with less than a majority of people because they're able to divide this four-way voter split.
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Videos

It's a matter of honor: Why Southerners are more polite

Unlike much of the United States, the South has a culture of honor. While this makes Southerners more polite, it's also something of a double-edged sword.

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  • Good hospitality and manners are well-known stereotypes of the American South.
  • Psychologists believe that the South is so well-mannered because it has a culture of honor, where an individual's reputation is highly valuable.
  • To test this, researchers conducted what's known as "the asshole experiment."
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Culture & Religion

Study finds that landlords exploit the poor

Landlords aren't the ones getting rich off of renting properties; slumlords are.

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  • A new study examined the profits of landlords across Milwaukee and compared them to landlord profits nationwide.
  • They found that for every 10 percent increase in neighborhood poverty, renter exploitation increased by 2.2 percent in Milwaukee and 0.8 percent nationwide. What's more, for every 10 percent increase in black residents, renter exploitation increased by 0.8 percent for both Milwaukee and the nation.
  • This effect ensures that the poor remain poor; since the poor have no choice but to pay rent when they can, any money they could save up is instead siphoned away by landlords.
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Politics & Current Affairs

Yale: White liberals dumb down speech when talking to minorities

The researchers call it a "competence downshift."

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  • The study examined how Democratic and Republican presidential candidates used language when speaking to black and white audiences.
  • A second study focused on how white people use language in emails to strangers with stereotypically white or black names.
  • The lead researcher called the findings "kind of an unpleasant surprise."
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psychology sociology society race
Surprising Science

Why non-conformists always end up looking alike

Go ahead, try and be different.

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  • Anti-conformists have an odd way of ending up looking like each other.
  • A Brandeis mathematician looks at how this synchronicity occurs.
  • Understanding the mechanism behind non-conformist conformity has applications in other areas, like the stock market.
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Culture & Religion