Professor brandt is conducting a study on he shows his study participants a picture of an adult-child pair. he tells half of the participants that they are looking at a parent and her child, while he tells the other half that they are looking at a day-care worker and a child in the day-care center. the group that thinks the pair is related rates them as looking more alike than the group that thinks they are not related.

Perceptual set                        

Explanation:

Perceptual set: It is defined as the propensity to notice, perceive or interpret few aspects of the accessible sensory data and therefore ignore others.

In psychology, the perceptual set describes a person's various expectations that configure experience by making a person sensitive to a particular type of data or information. The perceptual set is also known as perceptual expectancy, and it happens in different senses.

as university of miami psychologists debra lieberman and adam smith pointed out in a recent article in the journal current directions in psychological science, humans have social and psychological mechanisms to deter incest. with very few exceptions, marriages between brothers and sisters and between parents and their children are verboten in every human culture. the primary psychological anti-incest mechanism is the yuck response. even the idea of sex with their mom or dad, bro or sis is upsetting to most people. the psychologist jonathan haidt has found that nearly everyone is repelled by the prospect of brother-sister sex, even in hypothetical situations in which there is no chance of pregnancy).

the biological cost of incest

this raises an interesting question: just what’s so bad about incest? sure, having sex with your dad or your sister seems gross — but why? some anthropologists have argued that incest taboos are learned social conventions. this explanation, however, doesn’t make sense to me as it does not explain the widespread existence of anti-incest mechanisms in creatures ranging from cockroaches to chimpanzees. second, the incest taboo is about as close to a universal law as human moral rules get.

why should mechanisms to avoid incest be so widespread both in nature and across human societies? the answer is simple. the problem with having sex close with relatives is that there is an astonishingly high chance that your offspring will be born with a serious birth defect.

barack obama

i love this guy