"One person yawning sets off everyone else"

Deindividuation of Drivers: Is Everyone Else a Bad Driver?

The reduction of self-consciousness due to anonymity provided by a group or the inability to be individually identified is known as deindividuation (DI; Festinger, Pepitone, & Newcomb, 1952). Previous DI research has been focused on group interactions (Festinger, Pepitone, & newcomb, 1952), anonymity (Zimbardo, 1969), and (more recently) computer-mediated communication (Lee, 2008). One previous...

Essay: the challenge of providing adequate housing for the elderly ... along with everyone else.

NP Markets, or How To Get Everyone Else to Solve Your Intractable Problems

I discuss the prospects of opening securities markets in hard computational problems, including satisfiability, counting problems, and Bayesian inference problems. Such NP markets would offer direct monetary incentives for the development of better algorithms. Market prices would serve as collective approximate solutions, and bid-ask spreads may reflect problem difficulty. Some markets offer co...

Yawning Detection Sensitivity and Yawning Contagion

Contagious yawning-the urge to yawn when thinking about, listening to, or viewing yawning-is a well-documented phenomenon in humans and animals. The reduced yawn contagion observed in the autistic population suggested that it might be empathy related; however, it is unknown whether such a connection applies to nonclinical populations. We examined influences from both empathy (i.e., autistic tra...

Why Pay Taxes When No One Else Does?

Why Pay Taxes When No One Else Does? In this paper we try to understand the phenomena whereby a large proportion of the population evades tax payments. We present a model which incorporates elements from the theory of information cascades with the standard model of tax evasion and analyze the connection between the decision of a potential tax evader, the number of tax evaders and the number cau...