The Nature of Things

Is it possible to make judgments about a person's attitudes based solely upon their choice of reading matter? A study that was published late last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior makes the claim that that may be the case in at least one instance. The researchers gave 715 women between the ages of 18 to 24 a survey based on the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory , an exercise that measures attitudes that correspond with both benevolent and hostile sexism. Benevolent sexism was evinced on the survey by statements like “A good woman should be set on a pedestal by her man” and holds that men should take care of and provide for women. Hostile sexism, á la “Women are too easily offended,” regards women as straight-up inferior to men. ( Hmm ...wonder how a certain orange-tinted presidential candidate would score on the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory?)  The researchers then asked the women whether or not they had read all or any part of Fifty Shades of Grey and they correlated the response...

These past few days, I have been laid low by a tiny, vicious bug, one that made me unable to raise my head off the pillow or drag myself to the keyboard to connect with the world. Consequently, when I finally was able to make that trek from my bed to the chair in front of my computer today, I found my Google Reader full to overflowing with posts from the blogs that I follow. Skimming through those posts, there were a number of very interesting ones to which I need to give further thought, but one in particular caught my eye. It was an entry from Skeptical Science about a peer-reviewed scientific paper that explores the roots and the methods of scientific denialism. Here, I quote extensively from that post. The authors define denialism as "the employment of rhetorical arguments to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none , an approach that has the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists". They go on to identify 5 ...