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Category: Psychology

Coronavirus responses highlight how humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

Coronavirus responses highlight how humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

The more politicized an issue, the harder it is for people to absorb contradictory evidence. Drew Angerer/Getty Images News via Getty Images By Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University Bemoaning uneven individual and state compliance with public health recommendations, top U.S. COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci recently blamed the country’s ineffective pandemic response on an American “anti-science bias.” He called this bias “inconceivable,” because “science is truth.” Fauci compared those discounting the importance of masks and social distancing to “anti-vaxxers” in their…

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The role of cognitive dissonance in the pandemic

The role of cognitive dissonance in the pandemic

Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris write: Members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997, a spaceship would be traveling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective,…

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Lethargic global response to COVID-19: How the human brain’s failure to assess abstract threats cost us dearly

Lethargic global response to COVID-19: How the human brain’s failure to assess abstract threats cost us dearly

The Trump administration was not alone with its slow response to the COVID-19 crisis. Getty Images / White House Pool By Arash Javanbakht, Wayne State University and Cristian Capotescu, University of Michigan More U.S. citizens have confirmed COVID-19 infections than the next five most affected countries combined. Yet as recently as mid-March, President Trump downplayed the gravity of the crisis by falsely claiming the coronavirus was nothing more than seasonal flu, or a Chinese hoax, or a deep state plot…

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Do people become more selfless as they age?

Do people become more selfless as they age?

The main characters of ‘The Good Place’ become better over time. Michael Tran/FilmMagic via Getty Images By Ulrich Mayr, University of Oregon Looking for something to binge-watch while you’re hunkering down at home? Consider checking out the popular TV show “The Good Place.” Over four recently concluded seasons, the series follows the adventures and mishaps of four utterly self-centered characters on their quest to become decent and selfless human beings. The deeper question this philosophy-laced comedy raises is: Can people…

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In battling the coronavirus, will ‘optimistic bias’ be our undoing?

In battling the coronavirus, will ‘optimistic bias’ be our undoing?

Unless danger is flashing before us, we view risks through rose-colored glasses. slavemotion/iStock via Getty Images By Marie Helweg-Larsen, Dickinson College As the coronavirus has fanned across the globe, some people have been more complacent about the risk of contracting the virus than others. On March 21, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was apoplectic after photographs emerged of New Yorkers congregating in parks, apparently ignoring mandates for social distancing. “It’s insensitive, it’s arrogant, it’s self-destructive, it’s disrespectful and it has…

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Coronavirus and the isolation paradox

Coronavirus and the isolation paradox

Abdullah Shihipar writes: In December, a woman in Tulsa, Okla., used a Craigslist post to plea for holiday companionship. “Anybody need a grandma for Christmas?” she wrote. “I’ll even bring food and gifts for the kids! I have nobody and it really hurts.” More than three in five working Americans report feeling lonely. Now that the country is facing a disease outbreak that demands measures like “social distancing,” working from home and quarantines, that epidemic of loneliness could get even…

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How pluralistic ignorance affects voting choices

How pluralistic ignorance affects voting choices

Erika Weisz writes: Not too long ago, I briefly met Elizabeth Warren in a restaurant in Cambridge, near Harvard, where I’m now a postdoc in psychology. My dad and I saw the Massachusetts senator, a 2020 presidential candidate, walking in as we were walking out. “Give ’em hell,” my dad told the senator, harkening back to Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign. She laughed. “That’s what I do!” Last summer, in a New York Times article about Warren, a voter stated,…

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The biology of love

The biology of love

Ruth Feldman writes: After decades following thousands of mother-infant dyads, hundreds from birth to young adulthood, my lab has mapped the ‘neurobiology of affiliation’ – the emerging scientific field that describes the neural, endocrine and behavioural systems sustaining our capacity to love. The foci of our research – the oxytocin system (based on the neurohormone of bonding); the affiliative, or social, brain; and biological synchrony between mother and child – are all marked by great plasticity, and sculpted throughout animal…

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Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

What’s behind this natural tendency? Zhou Eka/Shutterstock.com By Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University Something is rotten in the state of American political life. The U.S. (among other nations) is increasingly characterized by highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own factual universes. Within the conservative political blogosphere, global warming is either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, vaccines, fluoridated water and genetically modified foods are known to be…

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Psychology still skews Western and affluent. Can it be fixed?

Psychology still skews Western and affluent. Can it be fixed?

By Michael Schulson, January 20, 2020 When Cristine Legare gives talks to groups of psychology researchers, she likes to take a quick poll of the room. How many of them, she asks, consider themselves to be “Western ethnopsychologists?” The question does not go over well. “They’re like, ‘What?’” Legare, a developmental psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, said. “It doesn’t resonate at all.” That confusion is precisely Legare’s point. For decades, the overwhelming majority of psychology research has…

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Why did shamanism evolve in societies all around the globe?

Why did shamanism evolve in societies all around the globe?

Thomas T Hills writes: Shamanism is as varied as those who practise it. Its practitioners range from indigenous lineages who have passed down their craft over thousands of years to the modern ‘plastic shamans’, who represent no specific culture but have adapted shamanism to meet the demands of metropolitan markets. However, there is a common theme to shamanism wherever it is practised: the use of spiritual (or shamanic) trance to facilitate journeys to a non-ordinary reality. Here, in this non-ordinary…

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Personality is not only about who but also where you are

Personality is not only about who but also where you are

By Dorsa Amir In the field of psychology, the image is canon: a child sitting in front of a marshmallow, resisting the temptation to eat it. If she musters up the willpower to resist long enough, she’ll be rewarded when the experimenter returns with a second marshmallow. Using this ‘marshmallow test’, the Austrian-born psychologist Walter Mischel demonstrated that children who could resist immediate gratification and wait for a second marshmallow went on to greater achievements in life. They did better…

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Why Trump attacked Marie Yovanovitch

Why Trump attacked Marie Yovanovitch

Molly Jong-Fast writes: On the second day of the impeachment proceedings, President Donald Trump couldn’t control himself on Twitter; he lashed out at Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine who was subjected to a smear campaign, and who testified to that effect before Congress. Trump’s lack of control, in itself, was not unusual. But, for some reason, Trump had shown more restraint 24 hours earlier, when William Taylor and George Kent offered their testimony. It was almost as if…

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The psychology of Greta Thunberg’s climate activism

The psychology of Greta Thunberg’s climate activism

Scott Koenig writes: In September 2019, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage activist, excoriated world leaders for their ongoing failure to address the climate crisis. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said at one point during her speech at the United Nations. Thunberg has been galvanizing public support for climate action since rising to prominence with her school strike about a year ago, and her latest remarks are no exception. They’ve attracted millions of…

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We learn more by trusting than by not trusting

We learn more by trusting than by not trusting

By Hugo Mercier We all know people who have suffered by trusting too much: scammed customers, jilted lovers, shunned friends. Indeed, most of us have been burned by misplaced trust. These personal and vicarious experiences lead us to believe that people are too trusting, often verging on gullibility. In fact, we don’t trust enough. Take data about trust in the United States (the same would be true in most wealthy democratic countries at least). Interpersonal trust, a measure of whether…

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I think, therefore I make mistakes and change my mind

I think, therefore I make mistakes and change my mind

Daniel Ward writes: Suppose that error could be abolished. What would someone who never makes a mistake be like? There are two very different responses to this question. One is to think of a superhuman, god-like being. The poet Alexander Pope’s line – ‘To err is human; to forgive, divine’ – is based on that thought. God might pardon but He cannot Himself make mistakes. Infallibility would seem to go hand in hand with omniscience and infinite wisdom. The other…

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