Here's an interesting little study whose findings will no doubt resonate wth most of us. It seems that women who have been angered by something will, when given a newspaper to read, seek out the news that will calm them and put them in a better mood. Men, on the other hand, deliberately seek out the news that will keep their anger stoked. Explains a lot really, doesn't it?

And in another example of social conditioning, a study of decision-making found that juries that were racially diverse (had both black and white members) performed better than all-white groups -- they deliberated longer, raised more facts about the case, conducted broader and more wide-ranging deliberations, made fewer factual errors in discussing evidence and when errors did occur, those errors were more likely to be corrected during the discussion. The particularly noteworthy finding was that this was not due so much to the contributions of minority members as to changes in the behavior of whites.