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Boston Globe
29-04-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
Social Studies: Erroneous estimates; what atheists think of other people's belief; an aggressiveness gap in women's basketball
Advertisement Intuitive belief It appears that even atheists generally think that belief in God is good. Researchers surveyed thousands of people from eight largely secular countries (Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, and Vietnam) and described for them a scenario in which an influential decision-maker either increased or decreased other people's belief in God as a side effect of trying to make money. The participants were then asked if they thought the decision-maker had intended to affect people's belief in God. Participants were more likely to believe the decision was intentional when the effect was to decrease belief in God. Because previous studies have found that people are more likely to ascribe intentionality to outcomes they see as bad, the researchers say the subjects of this study were revealing an intuitively positive attitude about belief in God. The pattern could be detected even in staunch atheists. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up Gervais, W. et al., 'Belief in Belief: Even Atheists in Secular Countries Show Intuitive Preferences Favoring Religious Belief,' Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (April 2025). Advertisement Taking the 3 Analyzing play-by-play data from NCAA Division I women's basketball, a study found that teams with male coaches attempted significantly more 3-pointers — ostensibly an indicator of risk-taking — even controlling for the score and time remaining in the game and the coach's age and years with the team. This disparity is consequential because 3-point attempts, especially when they're made early in the game, increase the chance of winning. One caveat: The study did not cover the most recent seasons, in which the frequency of 3-pointers may have increased, given their prominence in the NBA and the prominence of sharpshooting women like Caitlin Clark. Indeed, teams may have already become aware of findings like the one in this study. Böheim, R. et al., 'Male Coaches Increase the Risk-Taking of Female Teams — Evidence From the NCAA,' Labour Economics (June 2025). Power sees threat In surveys in both China and the United States, a political scientist found that taking the perspective of a leader of a powerful country induced people to perceive a neighboring country as more threatening and to support preemptive strikes. Also, Americans who were told that US power had increased recently were more likely to perceive security threats. A similar relationship was found in a 2020 survey of Russian elites: Those who felt that Russian power was on the rise were more likely to perceive the United States, Ukraine, and NATO as threatening. This was also seen in an analysis of Cold War-era documents published by the Department of State's Office of the Historian. Those who perceived US power in the strongest light were likelier to perceive threats from the Soviet Union, China, and the Vietcong. Advertisement Pomeroy, C., 'The Damocles Delusion: The Sense of Power Inflates Threat Perception in World Politics,' International Organization (Winter 2025). Ready leader one New research from the Harvard Kennedy School finds that good human leaders are also likely to be good at directing the activities of AI chatbots, suggesting a fast and cheap way to identify good leaders. The researchers assigned individual people to be the leader of three human followers or three AI 'followers' to whom the human leader could direct questions relating to a puzzle. The human test subject then had to synthesize the followers' responses into a final answer about the puzzle. Performance in the two categories was highly correlated, because intelligence and conversational skills were important regardless of whether the person was interacting with other humans or chatbots. Weidmann, B. et al., 'Measuring Human Leadership Skills With AI Agents,' National Bureau of Economic Research (April 2025).
South China Morning Post
08-04-2025
- Science
- South China Morning Post
China was home to Neanderthals, not just Europe or Middle East, Stone Age find suggests
Neanderthals might have lived in today's southwestern China during the Middle Stone Age, newly discovered tools similar to those previously found only in Europe and the Middle East suggest. Advertisement An international scientific team unearthed some 3,500 stone artefacts at a site in Yunnan province, and dated them to between 60,000 and 50,000 years old. Some stone tools showed key features of Quina technology – a tradition associated with Neanderthals living in cold, arid European environments around 70,000 to 40,000 years ago. The team of archaeologists, based in Australia, China, France, Italy, Spain and the United States, published their findings last week in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The Middle Paleolithic, or Middle Stone Age, which lasted from around 300,000 to 40,000 years ago, was a critical period in human evolution. In Africa, it was closely associated with the origin and evolution of early modern humans, while in Eurasia, it was linked to the development of different archaic human groups, such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans, the team said in contextualising its findings. Advertisement It was previously believed that early hominids in China showed slow technological development, particularly in adopting Middle Paleolithic advancements. But the new discoveries might change this idea, according to the paper.
