Problems with “Geography of Personality” Research

Sep 18, 2016 by

Problems with “Geography of Personality” Research

[This post was originally published in November 2012] While research on the geography of personality, such as the 2008 study by Rentfrow and colleagues, published in Perspectives on Psychological Science and described in the previous...

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The United States of Mind

Sep 18, 2016 by

The United States of Mind

[This post was originally published in November 2012] When I moved from upstate New York to California some five years ago, the culture shock was almost as significant as when I had moved from Russia to Israel, then to Canada, then...

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Turkey, Shmurkey! — A Response to Das et al. (2016)

Jun 10, 2016 by

Turkey, Shmurkey! — A Response to Das et al. (2016)

As promised in an earlier post, I am presenting here an informal response to the article, published recently in Genome Biology and Evolution by Paul Wexler, Eran Elhaik and colleagues (henceforth, Das et al. 2016). To summarize my...

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Religiosity in Russia

May 6, 2016 by

Religiosity in Russia

[Thanks to Boris Denisov and Martin Lewis for helpful discussions of these issues.] A recent question from a student about just how religious Russians really are has sent me to look for statistics on this issue. As sociologists of...

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Is Yiddish to Be Traced to Turkey?

Apr 29, 2016 by

Is Yiddish to Be Traced to Turkey?

[Thanks to Leni Silberman for originally drawing my attention to one of the media reports, and to Antonia Cavendish, Maria Soukhanova, Anna Dybo, Peter Shalen, Razib Khan, and Martin Lewis for helpful discussions.]   In the past few...

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