• testosterone and assertiveness, AI Overview

One study found that testosterone-related increases in anger and hostility did not affect assertiveness. However, another study found that high-testosterone students entered a room more quickly, focused more directly on their targets, and displayed a more forward and independent manner.

Testosterone is a steroid hormone that is associated with dominance behaviors in both animals and humans. Some of the ways testosterone is associated with dominance and status include:

Social dominance

One study found that adolescent boys who were perceived as socially dominant by unfamiliar peers had higher testosterone levels.

Status-seeking

Testosterone is associated with status-seeking motives in human social interaction.

Social hierarchy

High levels of testosterone promote behaviors intended to enhance one’s status over other individuals and to climb up the social hierarchy.

• Testosterone promotes either dominance or submissiveness in the Ultimatum Game depending on players’ social rank, Yukako Inoue, Taiki Takahashi, Robert P. Burriss, Sakura Arai, Toshikazu Hasegawa, Toshio Yamagishi & Toko Kiyonari

Endogenous testosterone promotes behaviours intended to enhance social dominance. However, recent research suggests that testosterone enhances strategic social behaviour rather than dominance seeking behaviour. This possibility has not been tested in a population whose members are known to vary in social status. Here, we explored the relationship between pre-existing social status and salivary testosterone level among members of a rugby team at a Japanese university, where a strong seniority norm maintains hierarchical relationships. Participants played a series of one-shot Ultimatum Games (UG) both as proposer and responder. Opponents were anonymised but of known seniority. We analysed participants’ acquiescence (how much more they offered beyond the lowest offer they would accept). The results showed that, among the most senior participants, higher testosterone was associated with lower acquiescence. Conversely, higher testosterone among the lower-status participants was associated with higher acquiescence. Our results suggest that testosterone may enhance socially dominant behaviour among high-status persons, but strategic submission to seniority among lower-status persons.

Acadia Healthcare is holding people against their will to maximize insurance payouts, a Times investigation found.

By Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas

Acadia Healthcare is one of America’s largest chains of psychiatric hospitals. Since the pandemic exacerbated a national mental health crisis, the company’s revenue has soared. Its stock price has more than doubled.

But a New York Times investigation found that some of that success was built on a disturbing practice: Acadia has lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will, even when detaining them was not medically necessary.

[read more]

Three Reasons Why You Need Anger
By Jill Suttie

While anger gets a bad rap, studies suggest it can help us achieve difficult goals, if used wisely.

Anger helps us with challenging goals
Anger may increase civic engagement
Anger can help us recognize our needs in relationships

Trump and Harris Embody a Stark Partisan Divide on Fighting Poverty, Jason DeParle

COMMENT: Kamala Harris largely off-loaded the “joy” onto the speakers and presentations that preceded her, as she presented a steely, anger-tinged, prosecutorial acceptance speech aimed at convincing voters of her Commander-in-Chief credentials. She also avoided talking about poor people. These measures may help her win in November. However, this article reports how many Democratic Party efforts do aim to reduce poverty.

 The two presidential candidates can both point to records of pushing poverty rates down, but their approaches could hardly be more different. The two presidential candidates can both point to records of pushing poverty rateThe presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump presents the sharpest clash in antipoverty policy in at least a generation, and its outcome could shape the economic security of millions of low-income Americans. [behind paywall] (read more) (posted in Poverty)

• You’re Only as Smart as Your Emotions, David Brooks

  the revolution in our understanding of emotion

  For thousands of years, it was common in Western thought to imagine that there was an eternal war between reason and our emotions. … Modern neuroscience has delivered a body blow to this way of thinking…. Most of the time emotions guide reason and make us more rational. It’s an exaggeration, but maybe a forgivable one, to say that this is a turnabout to rival the Copernican Revolution in astronomy.(Posted in Rationality) [Read More]

1. In 25 words or less, what’s wrong with the world?
2. In 25 words or less, why is this the case?
3. In 25 words or less, what can we do about it?

Unless you ask me not to, I’ll post your answers on “Three Questions” and identify you as the author (unless you post your response there).

An Amazon Books “small talk” search reports 90 books that have the phrase in the title or subtitle. Most of these books offer ways to improve small talk. Many present career advancement methods. Some suggest ways to use small talk as a step toward deeper conversation. A few adopt a more critical stance, including these:

• End Small Talk: Deep Questions for Better Conversations
• Turning Small Talk into Big Talk
• Get Honest or Die Lying: Why Small Talk Sucks

The Convivial Society
L.M. Sacasas
Over 34,000 subscribers

A newsletter about technology, culture., and the good life. The general idea is to think well about the meaning of technology and how it structures our experience while also conveying some sense of how we might better order our relationship to technology.

The main newsletter goes out two to three times monthly. Additional posts include occasional discussion threads and reading groups (for subscribers). The Convivial Society runs on a patronage model. The vast majority of what is published will arrive in your inbox if you sign up for the free emails. If you value the work, I encourage you to consider a paid subscription. A yearly subscription for $45 amounts to $3.75 per month.

Since, May 09, 2024, Sacasas has posted:

Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships
In this post, I’m thinking about how we are starved for personal relationships yet at every point sold impersonal substitutes. I tried to keep this one brief, which means a bit of nuance and background got left behind (although I did tuck some of it into the footnotes). I hope you’ll find it helpful nonetheless.

Re-sourcing the Mind
This post about Large Language Models (LLMs) the labor of articulation, and memory began as what I thought would be a brief installment. As if to prove one of the core claims of the essay, that the labor of articulation is itself generative, it grew in the writing. I hope you’ll find some things of use in it.

The Work of Art
This installment raises the question of the relationship between labor and creativity. In fact, it is just a variation on a question of increasing importance: how do we avoid offloading or automating the kind of work that is critical to our well-being?

The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life
This is a relatively brief post taking a recent Apple ad as a point of departure. I won’t rehash the criticisms that have already been offered elsewhere, but I did not want to pass on the opportunity to reflect on how we might better conceive of the relationship between our stuff and the good life. If you should reach the end of this essay and find that you’d like to read more on these themes, you can take a look at this 2022 installment: “The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self.”

The Ambling Mind
In this installment, I offer some thoughts about walking, a core human activity, which has been increasingly neglected or marginalized in the modern world. What we stand to gain by walking reminds us of one of the key principles of a convivial society: there is a scale appropriate to the human experience, and we do well to operate within it.

Meshell Ndegeocello Could Have Had Stardom but Chose Music Instead,
By Wesley Morris

• • NOTE: You may want to listen to the NPR Tiny Desk concert or listen to the No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin album on your preferred platform before reading Morris’ article.

The bassist, singer and composer’s 1993 debut jolted the industry — then she decided to change. Now she is releasing a powerful album inspired by James Baldwin.

A good musician’s relationship with the past is tricky. You want to move forward without entirely forsaking what you’ve already done. You don’t want it defining you when so much future defining lies ahead. It’s a dilemma Meshell Ndegeocello was thinking through at her dining room table in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, on a recent afternoon. (read more) [posted in Music]