After several reader requests, we've decided to bring back a small dose of Weird Science every weekend. Enjoy!
It pays to accentuate the negative (at least for guys): Alternately, appearances matter. This study looked at the role of empathy for couples in committed relationships. One of the things it found was it's more important to look like you care than to get things right. In research jargon, that's "The perception of empathic effort by one's partner was more strongly linked with both men's and women's relationship satisfaction than empathic accuracy." There was a difference between the sexes: men were happiest when they connected with their partner's positive emotions, but women had the most satisfaction in their relationship when the guys accurately recognized their negative emotions. Sounds like a recipe for disappointment.
Daylight Savings wastes time: Lack of sleep is never good for productivity, but some researchers figured out a rather direct impact of weariness: people are more likely to "cyberloaf." The authors of the study monitored how much sleep people got and then, the next day, had them watch a boring online lecture. Each hour of interrupted sleep typically meant an extra 8.4 minutes spent surfing the web instead of watching the video. To see whether this behavior translated into the real world, the team looked at the last few years of Google search data and found the shift to daylight savings time (which cuts an hour out of sleep time) correlated with an increase in searches for topics related to entertainment.
Obvious result of the week: violent couples don't cooperate well. The study did answer an outstanding question: why, exactly, do parents who are violent towards each other do a bad job raising their kids? The answer, however, is absolutely no shock. Cooperative parenting, in which both partners work together to handle the child rearing, is more effective. These couples can't manage it. One result that did go against common wisdom: when the standard for violence is below what we associate with domestic abuse, women were violent more often than men.
Not all narcissists are created equal: Narcissism is not exactly a personality trait we associate with ethical behavior. But a survey of some business school students indicates that it interacts with other personality traits. The researchers stratified their participants according to religious beliefs, and found those skeptical of religion tended to have the lowest ethical standards. But being a narcissist didn't make matters any worse. In contrast, among both the nominally and devoutly religious, narcissistic tendencies dramatically reduced ethical tendencies.
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