A team from Australia has published two new studies which show that questioning free will makes people more forgiving. In a pair of experiments involving about 260 people each, volunteers first recalled either a time they had hurt someone or a time someone had hurt them. Those who then read arguments that free will is an illusion later reported more self-forgiveness, more forgiveness toward the other person, and less hatred, while still feeling that responsibility mattered. A separate survey of nearly 9,000 people from 44 countries found that individuals who more strongly believed in free will tended to want harsher punishments even for everyday failings such as lying or selfishness. Together the work suggests that accepting free will as an illusion can reduce emotional harshness without removing accountability.
Researchers from in the United States have found that our DNA contains about 0.5 to 1% from a so-far unknown extinct human group. The team arrived at this conclusion by reconstructing the family trees of about 500 people worldwide. They found a lineage that split from ours roughly 800,000 years ago. The model which fits the data best also has it that the members of the now extinct lineage again interbred with our ancestors in Africa before they spread across the world.
Earlier research had already found hints of such “ghost” ancestry in some populations, especially in Africa. But the authors of the new study have now mapped the surviving fragments and also found them in every population studied.
Paper here. Press release here.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the claim that incompetent people are overconfident because they lack the ability to recognise their own incompetence. But researchers from the UK now say that this might be due to a misleading data analysis. They reanalysed data from about 4,000 people who participated in experiments in which they first answered grammar and logic questions and then predicted their own scores. The usual analysis asks: given someone’s actual score, how confident were they? The authors instead ask: given someone’s confidence, how good were they actually? They found that the more confident people were, the better they scored (on average), in contrast to what Dunning-Kruger would make you expect.
Their explanation is that the lowest scorers include average people who just happened to perform badly, so their self-estimates appear too high.
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