William Goodall's Blog Occasional mutterings

oDDmON oUT writes “MSNBC is reporting that a Columbia Business School study shows those who hold power over others make better liars. According to one of the study’s coauthors, ‘It just doesn’t hurt them as much to do it.’ For the average liar, she said, the act of lying elicits negative emotions, physiological stress and the fear of getting caught in a lie. As a result, she added, liars will often send out cues that they are lying by doing things like fidgeting in a chair or changing the rate of their speech. But for the powerful, the impact is very different: ‘Power, it seems, enhances the same emotional, cognitive, and physiological systems that lie-telling depletes. People with power enjoy positive emotions, increases in cognitive function, and physiological resilience such as lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Thus, holding power over others might make it easier for people to tell lies.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[From Study Shows People In Power Make Better Liars]

Or maybe liars are better at gaining positions of power. Fake degree on the wall and such.

Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds. [From Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ]

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. The findings will be published in the March 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Not exactly surprising.

Irish atheists defy a blasphemy law by publishing quotes it considers anti-religious, including by the Pope, on its website. [From Irish atheists challenge new law]

It seems likely the Irish Govt. will avoid this confrontation. Another case of selectively applied laws.