First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Borneman is little more than a credulous wall of verbosity. What stands out though is his completely uncritical retelling of the “Juliet” episode. It begins with a brother, who seeing he was only going to return from an orphanage six months later should not even have been there, and purely by random chance the two children just happened to be spied on by a tape recorder accidentally left running. It continues with all the classic means of installing a false memory by directed retelling and re-retelling of the account becoming more vivid and more detailed all the while. See Horry, Kvavilashvili & Talarico for some new results on the reliability of memories.
The only thing of value about this article is the comment by Robin Fox. N.B: See also Unwahrheiten und Lügen and Mütter for more about how the press and the judiciary deal with these things.
Another nice example of psychlogists’ mechanical use of statistics is found in Ruffle & Sosis: their participants took an average 6.9 minutes to fill in their form with a standard deviation of 15.7 minutes, which means that about one sixth of them, roughly 160 respondents, took less than minus 8.8 minutes. If you have any job that needs doing quickly and efficiently I suggest seeking those out and recruiting them on the spot.
Ruffle & Shtudiner have some important advice to all women: Do not attach a photograph to any job applications, regardless of whether you’re plain or attractive, it’ll lower your chances. Should a photograph be mandatory then choose the plainest one available. For men on the other hand it seems to pay to get professionally made up and retouched for the occasion.
Jack et al. are in contradiction to numerous other well established results. I note they pick out one single, distinctive, if numerous group, that is well known for its strong cultural repression of any showing of emotion. To determine whether this is a learnt cultural repression of the innate universal a similar test ought to be redone with infants.
Keysar and Lev-Ari provide two novel aspects for all those, planning to study or work abroad.