The Atlantic: Being Powerful Distorts People's Perception of Time

Maria Konnikova, writing in the New York Times, made the point recently that there’s much more to poverty than just a shortage of money. Being poor, she said, brings with it other abstract deficits, most notably a lack of time. She quoted Sendhil Mullainathan, an economist and the author of the book Scarcity: “The biggest mistake we make about scarcity is we view it as a physical phenomenon. It’s not.” [...]

A new study out of the University of California at Berkeley examined how the perception of time can be distorted by being in a position of power. With the help of hundreds of people, the study’s authors found that the more power people have, the more time they feel they have available in their lives. The researchers primed some subjects for feelings of either power or powerlessness by assigning them to the role of either boss or employee in a mock task of solving brain teasers. The bosses were told they’d be making decisions about which puzzles to solve and how to divvy up the highly-sought-after candy prize at the end of the exercise. Once primed, the subjects filled out surveys that revealed their perceptions of time availability. [...]

It’s often advantageous to delay gratification, and, according to the study, that’s what many powerful people do, because they’re more aware of the needs of their future selves. For that reason, the study found, they're also more likely to put money into savings. Perhaps this is because people in power have an easier time seeing that they’ll still be in a powerful, stable position well into the future.

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The Atlantic: What Good Is Thinking About Death?

More often though, it’s the hope of symbolic immortality that calms the frightened rabbits of death-fearing hearts—the idea that people are a part of something that will last longer than they do. Their culture, their country, their family, their work. When thinking of death, people cling more intensely to the institutions they're a part of, and the worldviews they hold.

What that actually means in terms of behavior, is trickier. The research shows that what people do when they’re feeling aware of their mortality depends on the person, the situation she’s in, and whether she’s focusing on death or it’s just in the back of her mind. (The TMT literature, which details a wide range of effects, is now fairly substantial. A 2010 metareview found 238 TMT studies, and this page on the University of Missouri website lists nearly 600, though it doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2012). [...]

Unfortunately, a lot of what death brings out when it's sitting at the top of the file drawer is not humanity’s most sterling qualities. If people feel motivated to uphold their own cultures and worldviews in the face of death, it stands to reason that they might be less friendly toward other worldviews and the people who hold them. [...]

But perhaps not more bothersome than other threats to meaning. Heine says Meaning Maintenance Model studies have found that thinking about death does not have a noticeably larger effect on people's attitudes and behaviors than, say, watching a surreal movie. A metareview of TMT studies also notes that the effects of thinking about death are less significant when compared with thinking about something else that threatens someone's sense of meaning.

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Political Critique: Cameron’s fate should be a warning to Slovak opposition leader Sulík

The political narrow-mindedness of Eurosceptics is not only a British problem. Richard Sulík is the chief face of Slovak Euroscepticism and has been poisoning the public sphere with shallow anti-European claims for years. His party scored 12.10% in the March 2016 elections, and scores at 16% in the latest polls. [...]

Surprisingly enough, a few days later he admitted that the EU has more advantages than disadvantages for Slovakia, namely “Schengen, the Euro and Eurofunds“. Why then is he constantly attacking the EU? Why, in the same way as Cameron, does he not understand that the EU cannot be built as a union from which you only pick the benefits and to which we sometimes pay something back so that there is something to take from again? Does he not realize that his permanent hateful campaign against the EU is only wind in the Slovak neonazis‘ sails? Does he not understand that his party, SaS will do the dirty work and it will be the neonazis who will score the points in a potential Slovak referendum for a Slovak exit from the EU, the same way they have collected political points from the leading social democrats’ Smer-SD anti-refugee rhetoric? [...]

The fear is that in walking a path towards Putin’s loving embrace, we will end up exchanging the “intellectual dictatorship of Brussels” for heiling fascists. At that moment, when Sulík will finally recommend voting “Remain” as “it is more advantageous”, it will be too late – just as it was for David Cameron.

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The Guardian: Turkey has defeated a coup – and unleashed a violent mob

Exactly who orchestrated the coup remains unclear. And, as usual in Turkey, conspiracy theories abound. While the government points the finger at the Pennsylvania-based Islamic cleric Fetullah Gülen, whom Erdoğan accused of attempting to oust him with a corruption scandal in December 2013, others believe the president himself stage-managed it all to consolidate his power by quashing the military for good.

According to this theory, Erdoğan now has a cast-iron excuse for future authoritarianism, having established himself as the country’s undisputed guardian of popular rule – after all, the coup failed after his supporters responded to his call to take to the streets. I don’t share this view. A better theory is that Friday was a last-ditch attempt by factions of the army desperate to remove Erdoğan before he pushed forward plans to change the constitution to establish an executive presidency for himself, and – more urgently – to prevent the purge of army personnel that was probably in the works before this weekend.

What is interesting is the complete lack of public support for the attempt. Turkey has a long-established history of coups, which have occurred punctually almost every decade (1960, 1971, 1980 – plus 1997’s “postmodern” coup). Staunchly secular nationalists who like the idea of militarily safeguarding the country from ideological leaders may have been expected to support the coup. And yet there was no evidence of that, despite heartfelt opposition to Erdoğan’s 13-year rule among about 50% of the population, and growing desperation at the lack of mainstream opposition in Turkish politics.

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The Guardian: How the UK halved its teenage pregnancy rate

It is a dramatic turnaround: in 1998, England had one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in western Europe. Last week, the Office for National Statistics released data revealing the fall in the conception rate among females aged 15 to 19 as the standout success story in the public health field: just 14.5 per 1,000 births were to women in their teens, with drops in all age groups under 25.

“It’s the result of an unusually long-term and ambitious strategy launched by the Labour government in 1999,” said Alison Hadley, director of the Teenage Pregnancy Knowledge Exchange at the University of Bedfordshire. “The drive to reduce teenage pregnancy was given 10 years to achieve a 50% fall in under-18 conception rates. Unusually for government schemes, efforts really were sustained for the full 10 years and ambitions weren’t lowered, despite difficulties and slow progress at the start.” [...]

“The two things that would make the biggest difference to regional differences in conception rates are making sex and relationship education compulsory in schools, and engaging with parents. Schools are vital but they can’t do it all. Parents have to be engaged for rates to go down.” [...]

“The conclusion of our paper was that there was a fair wind behind the teenage pregnancy strategy because all over the world rates were dropping,” she said. “The strategy made a big difference but the underlying trend towards fewer early pregnancies has been attributed to increased education, later completion of education and increased access to reliable contraception: long-acting, reversible methods which don’t depend on the reliability of the user.”

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