Thrillist: Why the Hell Did Humans Evolve to Be Ticklish?

What researchers who did just that found is that when tickled people laugh, it's an entirely different function than "social laughter," the noises you make when you find something funny, or even "taunting laughter," which is apparently a thing that needs studying.

For one, tickling laughter sounds different -- it has a "higher acoustic complexity" -- and activates parts of the brain that process auditory information, as well as a part of the brain related to language comprehension. In short, tickling laughter has meaning. But what?

Well, the researchers describe tickling laughter as an "unequivocal and reflex-like social bonding signal," related in part to how your brain processes language and working memory. It helps you form bonds with those close enough to tickle you, and your response signals that you have a relationship with the tickler. Social laughter grew out of this basic bonding response, but it can appear in scenarios that have nothing to do with touch; we humans have evolved to laugh at movies, for example, while chimps remain totally ignorant of Hollywood. [...]

So tickling serves a twofold purpose by identifying you as an individual, but also an individual in need of social interaction. "Laughter," Provine says, "reveals us as a social mammal, stripping away our veneer of culture and language, challenging the shaky hypothesis that we are rational creatures in full conscious control of our behavior."

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The Atlantic: Why Some People Take Breakups Harder Than Others

In these types of stories, rejection uncovered a hidden flaw, one that led people to question or change their own views of themselves—and, often, they portrayed their personalities as toxic, with negative qualities likely to contaminate other relationships. One study participant wrote: “I learned that I have a part of my personality that sabotages my happiness.” Another confessed: “I just feel hurt and rejected. I try to tell myself that it wasn’t my fault and that it was that person’s loss but I can’t help but feel inadequate.” [...]

But the loss of a partner can make it easy to fall into the self-deprecation trap. Research by the psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues shows that when people are in close relationships, their self becomes intertwined with their partner’s self. In other words, we begin to think of a romantic partner as a part of ourselves—confusing our traits with their traits, our memories with their memories, and our identity with their identity. In a measure designed to capture the closeness of a relationship, Aron’s team ask people to consider themselves as one circle, their partner as another, and indicate the extent to which the two overlap. [...]

So separating rejection from the self tends to make breakups easier, and linking the two tends to make them more difficult. But what makes people more likely to do one or the other? Past research by Dweck and others shows that people tend to hold one of two views about their own personal qualities: that they are fixed over the lifespan, or that they are malleable and can be developed at any point. These beliefs impact how people respond to setbacks. For example, when people consider intelligence to be something fixed, they’re less likely to persist in the face of failure than people who believe that intelligence can be developed.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Electoral College Blind Spot

Donald Trump’s victory in last November’s election victory came despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, making for the widest discrepancy between the popular vote and the Electoral College since 1876. So one measure of the quality of horse-race analysis is in how seriously it entertained the possibility of such a split in Trump’s favor. This is one point on which the data geeks generally came closer to getting the right answer. FiveThirtyEight’s statistical model, for example, saw the Electoral College as a significant advantage for Trump, and projected that he’d be about even money to win the Electoral College even if he lost the popular vote by 1 to 2 percentage points. Overall, it assigned a 10.5 percent chance to Trump’s winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, but less than a 1 percent chance of Hillary Clinton’s doing the same. [...]

But the “emerging Democratic majority” had a lot of flaws, some of which had been pointed out by data-savvy journalists for years. (See for example Real ClearPolitics’s Sean Trende, The Upshot’s Nate Cohn, and FiveThirtyEight contributor David Wasserman.) One basic problem with the theory is that while white voters without college degrees might have been declining as a share of the electorate, they still represented a hugely influential group and significantly outnumbered racial minorities in the electorate. According to Wasserman’s estimates, 42 percent of voters are whites without college degrees. By comparison, 27 percent of voters are nonwhite. If white noncollege voters were to start voting Republican by the same margins that minorities voted for Democrats, Democrats were potentially in a lot of trouble, even if they also made gains among college-educated whites.

Furthermore, whites without college degrees are overrepresented in swing states as compared to the country as a whole. Sure, there were some exceptions, such as Virginia. But in the average swing state — weighted by its likelihood of being the tipping-point state — whites without college degrees make up an average of 45.3 percent of the electorate, higher than their 41.6 percent share nationwide. That’s a big part of why Clinton won the popular vote while losing the Electoral College.

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JSTOR Daily: Does Street Protest Matter?

In 2012, Daniel Q. Gillion looked into the question of whether protests “work” in a very specific, quantifiable way: checking to see if they change how elected representatives vote. He did this by looking at civil rights protests between 1961 and 1995 and then considering the subsequent roll-call votes of the House representatives from the districts where the protests took place.

What he found was that representatives of districts with just the occasional protest weren’t likely to be swayed. But, in places where there were 50 protests over the course of two years, the typical representative became 5 percent more likely to take liberal positions on civil rights issues. If there were 100 protests in a district, the representative became 10 times more likely to take those positions. [...]

What that means is that, even in largely black and Latino areas where politicians might assume that their constituents were generally in favor of civil rights laws, protests made a difference in how politicians acted.

Slate: Trump Sold America a Miracle Cure

There are many who hope Trump’s supporters will hold him accountable. That they will insist he fulfill his promises about jobs or universal health coverage—and when those promises are broken, that their fervent support will turn into rage at having been duped, causing Trump anguish and eventually costing him re-election.

This is wishful thinking. Trump’s rise to power has followed a similar trajectory to that of quacks who peddle panaceas to the desperate—a bizarre and heartbreaking world I’ve long studied. Just like them, Trump will fail to deliver. But his supporters will find a way to exonerate him. Consider the ability of one “Archbishop” Jim Humble—a former gold prospector who claims extraterrestrial lineage—to persuade parents to pump their autistic children full of Master Mineral Solution, even though MMS, when activated by citric acid, becomes a dangerous form of industrial bleach. Or “Gerson” therapy evangelists, who talk cancer patients into paying thousands to detoxify with organic juice at a Tijuana, Mexico, clinic, despite studies showing the therapy is ineffective (unsurprising given that it was developed not by oncologists, but an early 20th-century Viennese doctor named Max Gerson as an unsuccessful tuberculosis treatment).

When people make big bets on miracle cures that fail to work, they rarely turn against the treatments or their merchants. Instead, they rationalize their misplaced faith, in order to save face, remain hopeful, and preserve an identity that’s defined by their courageous ability to reject the status quo. [...]

The process of embracing a charlatan’s empowering vision is not rational, which means that rational arguments are unlikely, in isolation, to dispel it. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that people cling tenaciously to their worldviews, and conflicting data may actually strengthen their beliefs. (Just look at this family who thinks Trump is “a man of faith who will bring Godliness back.”) To renounce Trump would mean admitting that one’s worldview—of a country wracked by carnage, as the president put it in his inaugural address, and a truth-telling hero who can heal it—is fundamentally mistaken. And that can also mean confronting existential panic without a panacea. It is much easier to forgive Trump for not locking her up than to wrestle with such truths.

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