"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.  If you want to be happy, practice compassion."  Dalai Lama 

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 14,500 abstracts. 

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 14,000 abstracts. 

Here are half a dozen recent research papers with broad social implications (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Kay and colleagues publish on "Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be."  They report four studies showing how widely this motivation acts - with political power, public funding, gender demographics, and in attacks on those who are trying to work for change.  There's relevance here to the second paper by Wilper et al on "Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults" estimating that, even after adjusting for income, education, health status, weight, exercise, smoking and alcohol use, lack of insurance was associated with about 45,000 excess deaths annually in the United States among people aged 18 to 64.  Still in the area of inequality and discrimination, Wexler et al publish on