Tag Archives: optimistic

Study: Military Death Sentence More Likely For Minorities

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Skin color plays a role in deciding whether to execute military criminals, according to a new study by a Michigan State University law professor who found minorities in the military are twice as likely as whites to be sentenced to death.

Catherine Grosso, associate professor at the MSU College of Law, and the late David Baldus, the Joseph B. Tye Professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, studied military prosecutions in all potentially death-eligible murders from 1984 to 2005. (more…)

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Are Your Values Right or Left? The Answer Is More Literal Than You Think

Up equals good, happy, optimistic; down the opposite. Right is honest and trustworthy. Left, not so much. That’s what language and culture tell us. “We use mental metaphors to structure our thinking about abstract things,” says psychologist Daniel Casasanto, “One of those metaphors is space.”

But we don’t all think right is right, Casasanto has found. Rather, “people associate goodness with the side they can act more fluently on.” Right-handed people prefer the product, job applicant, or extraterrestrial positioned to their right. Lefties march to a left-handed drummer. And those linguistic tropes? They probably “enshrine the preferences of the right-handed majority.” (more…)

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