An excerpt from a study just-released:
One of the greatest paradoxes in the field of time psychology is the time–emotion paradox. Over the last few decades, an increasing volume of data has been identified demonstrating the accuracy with which humans are able to estimate time. Confronted with this amazing ability, psychologists have supposed that humans, as other animals, possess a specific mechanism that allows them to measure time...Droit-Volet, Gil (July 2009) "The Time-Emotion Paradox". Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009 Jul 12;364(1525):1943-53.
However, under the influence of emotions, humans can be extremely inaccurate in their time judgements (Droit-Volet & Meck 2007). For example, the passage of time seems to vary depending on whether the subject is in an unpleasant or pleasant context. It drags when being criticized by the boss but flies by when discussing with our friends. That is the time–emotion paradox: why given that we possess a sophisticated time measurement mechanism, are we so inaccurate in our temporal judgements when experiencing emotions?
Labels: ciencia
Democracy ain't that bad, afterall
4 Comments Posted by Alex Guerrero on Sunday, July 12, 2009 at 8:08 PM.
An excerpt from Barry Schwartz -the author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less":
Here his TED Talk about how more choices make us less happy. He couldn't conclude any other way: "the secret to happiness is low expectations".
"[People] had very low expectations. They had no particular expectation when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what this is going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results".And instead of a pair jeans -his example- think in candidates and political parties in new democracies, and what do we expect from them and what do we get. Maybe is this why so many older generations develop that sort of nostalgia for the years of Franco, the Mexican PRI or the PCUS?
Here his TED Talk about how more choices make us less happy. He couldn't conclude any other way: "the secret to happiness is low expectations".
Labels: ciencia política, democracy
