For their latest campaign soap and beauty company Dove decided to conduct a rather interesting social experiment centered around female self-image. A forensic artist was hired to sketch a couple of volunteers based on their own description of themselves. Then a group of strangers described those same volunteers to the artist for a different sketch. The two drawings were then compared and the results were startling. All of the women described themselves in a less favoring manner than the strangers did. Enter the Dove campaign slogan, "You Are More Beautiful Than You Think." Brilliant!

BPS Research Digest reports on how a study by Dr. Gail Heyman discovered that parents do indeed lie to their children in order to teach or control their behavior. What her and her team did was present a group of both American and Chinese parents with a list of "instrumental lies". They then had to identify which they had used on their children. Results showed that many of them, eighty-four per cent of US parents and 98 percent of Chinese parents to be exact, admitted to telling at least one of the 16 instrumental lies to their kids. According to those strong statistics, it's safe to say that we do indeed lie to our kids when we want them to learn or know specific things!

YouTube channel Tragedy And Hope explores the concepts of change and human evolution. The following is an introspective look at the meaning of our so-called lives via a lecture by the late Alan Watts. He asks what we would do if money were no object. And we ask you to seriously consider the possibility.

Product manager, feminist and advertising expert Teresa Valdez Klein knows a thing or two about the tactics online marketers use on unsuspecting Facebook users. As you would have it, the social media platform, in all its glory, is really just a tool that allows the marketing world to pinpoint exact demographics. So the question then becomes: What happens when this "subvertising" gets downright offensive and touchy for the user? Like when Teresa updated her online profile from married to single. The results were staggering! She points out how the marketers (automated or not) immediately flooded her with ads pertaining to weight loss, dating services, etc., all forcing her to believe that she was wrong and stigmatized for her reality. Thankfully Teresa was aware of the tactic and decided to take matters into her own hands. She purchased low-cost ads and advertised to her own female demographic about how their bodies were okay and life wasn't terrible. Go Teresa! Way to reverse the careless (and psychotic) advertising that really messes with our happiness.

Ladies, they're priming the pump with our lives. The marketers don't really care whether you're happy in your marriage as long as you buy a ring.

Graphic Designer, Ryan Perera teams up with voice actor Andrew Howell to create an animated video that discusses the phenomena of procrastination. The short presents numbers and facts like how 70% of the population suffers from it daily, ideas like the Temporal Motivation Theory and what we can do to combat it. Hey, if you're like us, always juggling creative tasks and long-term goals, you may want to pay attention to some of this one. Or you can always just bookmark it and do something else prior to...

Columnist Jon Ronson of The Guardian writes about his recent encounter with author Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts--a book about the importance of introverts and how our society should embrace the quality. He goes on to point out several examples, both from the book and in his own personal life, about how structuring things for introverts can help us empower people that are naturally more thoughtful, respectful and empathetic as opposed to the more generally-rewarded extrovert qualities like competitiveness and aggression. No offense to the extroverts (we've learned much from them), but it sounds like they can a learn a thing or two from the stillness of an introvert. Read the entire article here.

The loudest, most socially confident and quickest on their feet win the day, whereas the contemplative and quietly well-informed tend not to get a word in. School classrooms are increasingly designed to reflect this flawed environment. 

Hunter Walk, the director of product management at YouTube recently wrote a piece for Fast Company and their Co. Exist division that asks Can Online VIdeo Usher In A New Age Of Empathy? According to him, yes! He points out several examples in his article, including one about a a boston woman who started teaching English via her kitchen and now has over 30 million students that watch her lessons from across the globe! Peep the entire piece here.

The power of the moving image to bring people together is having a global effect that’s never been seen before. Now that we all have access to the same media, can it connect us more strongly?

Hate to say it, but it's true--as amazing as The Internet has been for information exchange, innovation and the spread of ideas, statistics show that it is indeed ruining the way we literally think. Forensic Psychology shines creative light on the reality via an infographic titled How The Internet Is Ruining Your Brain. Check it out in its entirety here.

We suppose that most of our readers already know this, but we here at República really love social commentary. Here's some that comes from our good friend, Jeff Lapaixx, who decided to take his frist stab at documentary work. We could spend time describing its context, but thought that it'd just be better to let the man himself describe it in his own words:

This is my first of several documentaries. It deals with various racial identity issues that Dominicans [sub]consciously deal with on a regular basis. Ideologies imposed on the caribbean by colonial power Spain, and enforced throughout history by Spanish elites, western european philosophies, and the entire Trujillo dictatorship

Enjoy and don't forget to thank Jeff!

Here's a chilling half-hour documentary that breaks down the use of media and mind-control to breed a culture of violence. The piece utilizes recent American military practices, popular videogame culture, reference to George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and commentary from a few thinkers like Noam Chomsky and John Trudell, among others, to paint a vivid picture of this sadistic reality. Deep!