Science News for Writers

How many movies and TV shows use the conflict between potential in-laws and a suitor?   Some?   . . .most?                 . . .all?  This is the conflict of so many sit-coms and rom-coms.  Boy meets girl.  Girl introduces boy to parents.  Parents freak out.  A plot is born. So what does science say about this ever-lasting theme?  Is there a best way to resolve the issue? Note to authors and screenwriters :  Here is a list of ways to do it right.  Of course, you want to use the wrong ways in your story, (at least at first), or have no story.  Romeo & Juliet wouldn't be Romeo and Juliet without the Montagues and Capulets, would it?  As always, there is a link to the full report in the attribution. *  *  *  *  * 'I am right for your child!' Research reveals the best tactics for manipulating your partner's parents The key to dealing...

cw33.com This election year has produced 17 Republican presidential candidates, which on its surface  may appear to give the party a competitive advantage. Evolution, however, disagrees. The 2016 Presidential race is in full swing, with the news cycle currently dominated by a slate of seventeen seemingly qualified candidates for the Republican nomination.  The assumed wisdom is that competition is good, leading to the eventual emergence of the best candidate. But is it?  This study out of Michigan State University suggests otherwise, that too many candidates is as bad as too few - according to their application of the theories of evolution of decision-making strategies. As many have noted, it's very hard for an individual candidate in this pack to make himself or herself heard over the din of attack and counter-attack between the current leader and the pack. As yesterday's post pointed out, it appears that when faced with a multitude of options, the human bra...

It's opening weekend of the 2015 NFL season, so it's as good a time as any to talk about a statistical model that allows a defensive coordinator to know with about 90% accuracy what play the opposing offensive is going to call.  This could change football as much as SABRmetrics has changed baseball. Of course, offensive coordinators can use the model to understand the tendencies of his own team and call plays outside their team's propensities. The one coach that this probably wouldn't have effected was Vince Lombardi.  During the Packers run in the sixties, he called a limited number of plays.  It was going to be student body right or student body left, usually to the right.  In practice, Lombardi ran plays until they were thoroughly ingrained in his players.  Every other defensive coordinator, coach and player knew what the Packers  were going to call on any given play. Bart Starr would take the snap, Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston would pull and ...

Credit: Spanish National Police A 19-year-old woman forced into prostitution and rescued by the Spanish National Police in Madrid has a bar code on her wrist. The tattoo also displays the amount of money she owed her traffickers: 2,000 euros. The woman had multiple injuries from being beaten. Men who buy sex have much in  common with sexually coercive men Findings support decades of research Men who buy sex have less empathy for women in prostitution than men who don't buy sex and are more likely to report having committed rape and other acts of sexual aggression, according to a new study. The study of 101 men in the Boston area who buy sex and 101 men who do not -- all of whom were promised confidentiality -- indicates that the perspective of sex buyers has similarities to that of sexual aggressors. "Our findings indicate that men who buy sex share certain key characteristics with men who are at risk for committing sexual aggression," s...

wegotthiscovered.com Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk, a San Francisco detective who suffers obsessive compulsive disorder, created by writer and producer Andy Breckman. The television detective Monk was an enjoyable character, solving crime despite being portrayed as being nearly crippled by his obsessive compulsive disorder.  What attribute of the Monk character made him effective at solving crime?  Or rather, what attribute might the writers have picked up on that made him able to solve crimes that baffled others? As this research points out it was his imagination.  He was obsessive because he could imagine the germs on every door knob and so on, so he had a well developed ability to picture "what-ifs." This in turn gave him the ability to imagine all sorts of possible solutions that those of us lacking a hyper-imagination would miss. I don't know that this was the writer's thought process, but it came through in Monk's thought processes. Here's...

Brian Doyle-Murray as Frank Shirley in the must-see-every-holiday- season classic, Christmas Vacation, written by John Hughes. Came across this study from 2012 while researching an article.  It sure explains a lot. . . not just how the CEO, Frank Shirley, came to make his disastrous cost-cutting decision in the movie Christmas Vacation written by John Hughes.  It explains how so many bone-headed decisions are made by business executives and owners. In simplest terms, our brains can either be analytical or empathetic, but not both at the same time because being one shuts down the other.  Why would this be?  There has to be an evolutionary advantage to this dichotomy.  If soldiers on a battlefield feel empathy toward an enemy, would they pull the trigger?  Would a caveman be able to feed his family if he thought, "Oh, look Bambi."  So there is a reason we're wired this way. Today, this phenomena can lead to disaster, as happened to the Grisw...