Free Republic

U.S.—Pioneering smart thermostat company Matrimostat announced a brand-new thermostat that will automatically set the temperature to whatever your wife wants. “The Matrimostat 2000 uses advanced quantum technology to identify your wife’s temperature preference before she even mentions it --often before she even knows it!” says CTO Ted Shmarmanarf. “It’s a lot more challenging than it sounds. Research showed that many women don’t know what they want until at least an hour after they wish it had already happened, so the thermostat had to be able to accommodate for that.” "Now this is one smart thermostat." Shmarmanarf says that the solution...

Protest prioritizes emotion over effectiveness unless *highly* disciplined and targeted. Otherwise, it can play into opponent narrative. I attended Operation Gridlock Springfield. I am writing this because it went all wrong! I am hoping others will heed this warning so the upcoming Rallies will be Fun, encouraging and successful. I learned right here on FREE REPUBLIC, what was acceptable behavior when Conservatives attend a Protest! THANK YOU FREE REPUBLIC! I beg you please Publish them again, so Newbies can HAVE A CLUE! I just FLED OPERATION GRIDLOCK in Springfield Illinois, because I did not want to be a part of...

THE DEVON WHEELER EXPERIMENT There are two very famous psychology experiments and the one I inadvertently tripped face first into (Devon Wheeler above) clearly illustrate a lot of what is wrong with us “grand as gravy” people. How many of us have one ounce of individuality, of independent thought, or are we all just the same as sheep or dogs that blindly follow the pack wherever it goes? Merely rhetorical, of course. Firstly, the Stanford Prison Experiment is probably the most famous one. Briefly, in 1971, at Stanford, Phillip Zambrano conducted an experiment. He randomly selected 24 male students to...

They label their opponents as racists – one of the most odious things a person can be thought of in America – with absolutely no substantiation for the charge, and they do it unceasingly. When words fail, they violently attack those with whom they disagree. Indeed, they routinely countenance violence yet, in passive-aggressive stance, bleat like helpless, wretched victims when their opponents take the offensive, or even suggest taking the offensive. In the workplace, they take improper liberties with their subordinates and engage in fraud in order to get their children into high-profile universities. Their captains of industry conspire to...

When the 66 Express Lanes opened a year ago, officials promised the tolls would mean a smoother ride on the interstate, a major east-west thoroughfare from Northern Virginia into the District that is infamous for its headache-inducing congestion. The state’s promise — less congestion and faster travel times during rush hour — has been fulfilled for many commuters able to pay or carpool, but the new toll system has had an adverse effect for many of the remaining road users. For some commuters, the rush-hour period has simply shifted later — outside the toll hours — and dumped them onto...

Get ready for lots of rioting. Oh wait, we don't do that. Never mind.

When Donald Trump surprised the world by winning the 2016 election, liberals clung to the idea that his victory was illegitimate because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. According to a psychologist who supported Clinton in 2016, however, Google's bias in Clinton's favor may remove even that symbolic victory from her. Almost all of Clinton's popular vote margin could be attributed to Google bias, making her win "negligible." Dr. Robert Epstein, a psychologist who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, actually reported this finding last year, but he explains how it works in the upcoming film "The Creepy Line." Epstein made...

WASHINGTON — Extended Interstate 66 HOV hours and high morning tolls aimed at reducing the number of cars hitting a chokepoint passing the Dulles Connector Road appear to be the biggest drivers of traffic changes since tolls for solo drivers began in December.A new state review of traffic and tolling data on I-66 and parallel roads over the first six months finds more concentrated and severe eastbound traffic delays through the Rosslyn area now than in the same period last year between 8 a.m. and 9:15 a.m., but significantly reduced traffic jams on I-66 inside the Beltway elsewhere and during...

When social pressure dictates the definition of achievement, including self-destructive behavior, the culture at large is in trouble Self-destructive behavior is now defined as an achievement Facing down crises has always been a measure of reaching adulthood. How a youth responds to peril, especially when they display courage in challenging circumstances, is the line that is crossed to gauge maturity. Rites of passage vary among cultures but the one aim they usually share is the acquisition of skills needed to provide for and raise a family. Historically, the skills included proficiency with tools used for these purposes such as knives,...

People walk past the building that houses the offices of Cambridge Analytica in central London, March 20, 2018. Share WASHINGTON — Long before its controversial roles in the 2016 Brexit vote and U.S. presidential election, Cambridge Analytica influenced elections in Africa. The data mining company, under fire for its alleged use of 50 million Facebook accounts to shape campaign messages for then-candidate Donald Trump, also played a role in elections in Kenya and Nigeria, according to new reports. The company's first involvement in Africa dates to the general election in South Africa in 1994. That election marked the end of...

Maya Shankar, a White House adviser cultivating a team tasked with subtly influencing Americans’ behavior, previously worked closely with the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, WND has learned. Shankar has discussed utilizing cognitive science for social activism and is a champion of so-called social justice.

On September 15, 2015, Barack Obama signed an Executive Order with the intent on implementing “Behavioral Science Insights to Better Serve the American People.” The Executive Order (EO) is based on a “growing body of evidence demonstrating that behavioral science insights — research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them — can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people.” Furthermore, the EO continues, “Where Federal policies have been designed to reflect behavioral science insights, they have substantially improved outcomes for the individuals, families, communities,...

The Democratic Party and the liberal left’s obsession with disparate impact race politics crept into K-12 public education. Their latest social engineering experimentation uses black and Hispanic kids in poor urban classrooms as pawns for political power. Education is secondary. Liberals believe they can artificially wipe away serious behavior problems that are cultural in nature. They do this by labeling reasonable standards of classroom discipline as racist or discriminatory. When urban schools with predominantly black and Hispanic students enacted protocols that create an environment where learning can take place, more suspensions and expulsions resulted, accompanied by a widening of the...

Have you ever met one of those families that just seem to have it all together? Maybe you knew such a family growing up and loved hanging out over at their house – there was such a great atmosphere there that you kind of felt like you were coming home whenever you stopped over. The parents were happy. The kids were all well-adjusted and generally did the right thing. Everyone in the family seemed to genuinely love, respect, and care about each other. They all truly enjoyed each other’s company and had a blast doing things together. Sure, they...

Hillary Clinton will behave in the future like she behaved handling the attack at Benghazi. I have taught Leadership and Management to college students and Soldiers. I am aware of almost all theories and "laws" concerning Leadership and Management. I have found that there are two theories or "laws" that hold up every time in the real world. 1. The best predictor of future behavior from someone is their past behavior. 2. The Law Of Effect - You will generally receive more of the behavior that is rewarded and less of the behavior that is punished. Take a look at...

In an echo of claims made following the San Bernardino massacre, a former co-worker of Omar Mateen, the dead suspect in the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, says that he complained to Mateen’s employer about the man’s “unhinged” behavior, but the company ignored complaints because Mateen was Muslim. Florida Today reports: A former Fort Pierce police officer who once worked with 29-year-old Omar Mateen, the assailant in an Orlando nightclub shooting that left at least 50 dead, said he was “unhinged and unstable.”

Analyses of the subjects ratings revealed three varieties of stupid mistakes. The first is when a person’s confidence outstrips their skill, as when a Pittsburgh man robbed two banks in broad daylight without wearing a disguise, believing that lemon juice he had rubbed on his face would make him invisible to security cameras. [..] The confidence-skill disconnect has been dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect, after a study by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. Dunning and Kruger had Cornell undergraduates perform tests of humor, logic, and grammar, and then rate how well they think they performed compared to other subjects...

(This conversation has been edited and condensed.) *** There have been some high-profile lies this election season. The most recent that comes to mind is the story about the thousands of Muslims that were supposedly having tailgate-style parties celebrating after 9/11. In the book, you say, essentially, we’re OK with lies. Can you walk me through why we’re built not only for being deceptive, but also tolerating deception? Trump’s supporters don’t particularly care whether he’s lying or not. Our brain doesn’t really care—I know that’s appalling. Our default position is we simply want to be right. This is why our...

I have been making a mistake for most of my life. See, I'm an economist, and one of the things that attracted me to economics is the notion of the "ideal economy." Of course, there are valid objections to the use of markets. There are people who cheat and commit fraud, and there are problems with information and market power and externalities. Sometime consumers make mistakes.

Prepare to be “nudged” by Obama's new “behavioral science” squads — for your own good, of course. Under the guise of better “serving” the American people through government, Obama signed an executive order this week calling for federal agencies and departments to deploy emerging “behavioral science” techniques against the public.Among other goals, the expansion of federal mind manipulation is supposed to help more Americans access government welfare programs, take their “recommended” vaccines, supply more information about themselves to the federal government, and accelerate the transition toward what Obama called “a low-carbon economy.” The controversial decree, signed on September 15, explicitly...