Round-up: Are universities getting even more left-wing?

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

Laws about bodily damage originate from shared intuitions about the value of body parts. Yunsuh Nike Wee and colleagues examine the cross-cultural basis of intuitions about the value of different body parts. Analysing five legal codes from highly diverse cultures, as well as surveys of Americans and Indians, they find substantial agreement about the value of different body parts. This pattern holds across multiple measures of value.

A Meta-Analysis of Procedures to Change Implicit Measures. Patrick Forscher and colleagues carry out a meta-analysis of interventions designed to change implicit beliefs and attitudes. Analysing 492 studies, encompassing 87,418 participants, they find that such interventions generally have weak effects. They also find that such interventions have trivial effects on explicit beliefs and attitudes and almost no effect on behaviour.