Worlds Tech News

Weird Science is desperate to shift the blame to somebody… anybody

Blamestorming spreads like the plague: It's a typical experience in a large organization: a project has gone bad, and everybody involved looks to find ways to shift responsibility. But that practice is  almost certainly self-defeating, according to a paper entitled, "Blame contagion: The automatic transmission of self-serving attributions." If people are directing their mental energy into pointing fingers, they're not going to spend time figuring out what went wrong and learning from that. The authors show that watching someone assign blame in these situations makes others in a group more likely to view doing so as a goal, one that they pursue themselves. As a result, blame actually does become contagious.

As if the carcinogens and nicotine weren't bad enough: Given the damage that cigarette smoke does to the integrity of the lungs, nobody should very surprised that bacterial infections of the airways is a common problem for smokers. What may be more of a surprise is the fact that the cigarettes themselves may be a disease vector. Researchers took cigarette samples from four major brands, and subjected them to an analysis that can identify the species based on ribosomal RNA gene sequences. The result? "Fifteen different classes of bacteria and a broad range of potentially pathogenic organisms were detected in all cigarette samples," write the researchers.