Blame Evolution for Back Pain, Showing Off Your Status Doesn’t Make Friends, and Make Babies Smarter by Pretending to Understand Them

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Self-improvement, Science, Astronomy, Education

4.6 • 935 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2020

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Learn about why signaling your status makes it harder to make new friends; the evolutionary reason why humans have so much back pain; and how pretending to understand babies can make them smarter.

Signaling your status makes it harder to make new friends by Steffie Drucker

Forget the bling: High status-signaling deters new friendships. (2018, August). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-08/sfpa-ftb081518.php
Garcia, S. M., Weaver, K., & Chen, P. (2018). The Status Signals Paradox. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(5), 690–696. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618783712
Pinsker, J. (2018, September 27). The Misconceptions People Have About Luxury Purchases. The Atlantic; The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/09/buying-luxury-goods-value/571525/

Why do humans have so much back pain? Thank evolution by Grant Currin

Human Evolution: Gain Came With Pain. (2013, February 16). Human Evolution: Gain Came With Pain. Science | AAAS. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2013/02/human-evolution-gain-came-pain#
Your back pain may be due to evolution and spine shape. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/sfu-ybp030420.php
Plomp, K. A., Viðarsdóttir, U. S., Weston, D. A., Dobney, K., & Collard, M. (2015). The ancestral shape hypothesis: an evolutionary explanation for the occurrence of intervertebral disc herniation in humans. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-015-0336-y
Plomp, K. A., Dobney, K., Weston, D. A., Strand Viðarsdóttir, U., & Collard, M. (2019). 3D shape analyses of extant primate and fossil hominin vertebrae support the ancestral shape hypothesis for intervertebral disc herniation. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-019-1550-9
Plomp, K. A., Dobney, K., & Collard, M. (2020). Spondylolysis and spinal adaptations for bipedalism. Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, 2020(1), 35–44. https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoaa003
Spondylolysis. (2020). https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/spondylolysis

Keep Pretending To Understand Babies—It Makes Them Smarter by Anna Todd

https://curiosity.com/topics/keep-pretending-to-understand-babiesit-makes-them-smarter-curiosity

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.
0:06.5	I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about why signaling your status makes it harder to make new friends, the evolutionary reason why humans have
0:14.9	so much back pain, and how pretending to understand babies can make them smarter.
0:19.6	Let's satisfy some curiosity.
0:21.8	When it comes to making friends you might think showing off
0:24.5	your most expensive stuff would make the best first impression but new research
0:29.0	says that that's exactly the wrong approach. It turns out that luxury status signals make it harder to make new friends.
0:35.7	If you please put away the diamond necklace Ashley. Oh but I thought you'd love it.
0:41.2	Does you love my bling?
0:44.0	I always need more bling on this podcast, I always say.
0:48.0	Well, to find this out, researchers at the University of Michigan
0:52.0	created several hypothetical scenarios.
0:54.5	In one scenario, they asked residents of a swanky suburb to imagine they were driving to a
0:59.1	wedding reception where they hoped to make some new friends. Would they take their luxury car or something less flashy?
1:06.0	More than two-thirds picked the luxury vehicle.
1:09.0	A second group was asked to imagine they saw someone arrive to a wedding reception in either a luxury ride or a more basic car.
1:17.0	When they were asked how closely this person matched their ideal of a new close friend, the would-be friends were far less interested in the person
1:25.3	driving a luxury car than the more basic vehicle.
1:29.2	In another experiment, scientists asked 62 college students to pick a partner to have a getting to know you conversation with.
1:36.7	The students were asked to choose their partner, supposedly in the next room, from two virtual profiles.
1:46.1	Those profiles revealed stuff like what type of car and brand of winter jacket each person owned, among other things. The fancier candidate who drove a
1:52.1	new BMW and wore a Canada Goose jacket was only picked a quarter of the time.
	...

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