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Category: Psychology

The American aversion for psychological complexity

The American aversion for psychological complexity

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Dahlia Lithwick writes: The launch of the 2020 presidential contest has triggered yet another round of uniquely American anxiety around the stability of character. We’re only a few weeks into the nascent primary campaign, and already the public discourse is mired in a debate that seems to be consumed with which of the Democratic candidates is in fact tricking us. Amy Klobuchar appears to be a sweet Minnesota girl, but is she secretly a crazed, potentially abusive harpy? Elizabeth Warren…

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People who are moved by sad music may be better at feeling the pain of others

People who are moved by sad music may be better at feeling the pain of others

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Amy X. Wang writes: While research into human cognition has long noted that music—chords, harmonies collections of sound comprising something of a universal language—has a profound relationship to the thoughts and emotions of people all over the world, a study published in the scientific journal Frontiers of Psychology peers into qualities and effects specifically associated with sad music. Think somber, angsty, tugging-at-your-heartstrings type of melodies. According to the study, appreciation for such melancholy tunes is intriguingly linked to one particular…

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Why do people fall for fake news?

Why do people fall for fake news?

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Gordon Pennycook and David Rand write: What makes people susceptible to fake news and other forms of strategic misinformation? And what, if anything, can be done about it? These questions have become more urgent in recent years, not least because of revelations about the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 United States presidential election by disseminating propaganda through social media platforms. In general, our political culture seems to be increasingly populated by people who espouse outlandish or demonstrably false claims…

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The fallacy of obviousness

The fallacy of obviousness

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Teppo Felin writes: Scientific experiments don’t generally attract widespread attention. But the ‘Gorillas in Our Midst’ (1999) experiment of visual attention by the American psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris has become a classic. In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman highlights this experiment and argues that it reveals something fundamental about the human mind, namely, that humans are ‘blind to the obvious, and that we also are blind to our blindness’. Kahneman’s claim…

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Strangers smile less to one another when they have their smartphones, study finds

Strangers smile less to one another when they have their smartphones, study finds

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PsyPost reports: New research suggests that phones are altering fundamental aspects of social life. According to a study published in Computers in Human Behavior, strangers smile less to one another when they have their smartphones with them. “Smartphones provide easy access to so much fun and useful content, but we wondered if they may have subtle unanticipated costs for our social behavior in the nondigital world. Smiling is a fundamental human social behavior that serves as a signal of people’s…

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How Donald Trump appeals to men secretly insecure about their manhood

How Donald Trump appeals to men secretly insecure about their manhood

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Eric Knowles and Sarah DiMuccio write: From boasting about the size of his penis on national television to releasing records of his high testosterone levels, President Trump’s rhetoric and behavior exude machismo. His behavior also seems to have struck a chord with some male voters. See, for example, the “Donald Trump: Finally Someone With Balls” T-shirts common at Trump rallies. But our research suggests that Trump is not necessarily attracting male supporters who are as confidently masculine as the president…

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You can’t characterize human nature if studies overlook 85 percent of people on Earth

You can’t characterize human nature if studies overlook 85 percent of people on Earth

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By only working in their own backyards, what do psychology researchers miss about human behavior? Arthimedes/Shutterstock.com By Daniel Hruschka, Arizona State University Over the last century, behavioral researchers have revealed the biases and prejudices that shape how people see the world and the carrots and sticks that influence our daily actions. Their discoveries have filled psychology textbooks and inspired generations of students. They’ve also informed how businesses manage their employees, how educators develop new curricula and how political campaigns persuade…

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How reliable are the memories of sexual assault victims?

How reliable are the memories of sexual assault victims?

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Jim Hopper writes: Incomplete memories of sexual assault, including those with huge gaps, are understandable–if we learn the basics of how memory works and we genuinely listen to survivors. Such memories should be expected. They are similar to the memories of soldiers and police officers for things they’ve experienced in the line of fire. And a great deal of scientific research on memory explains why. I’m an expert on psychological trauma, including sexual assault and traumatic memories. I’ve spent more…

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Octopuses on ecstasy reveal genetic link to evolution of social behaviors in humans

Octopuses on ecstasy reveal genetic link to evolution of social behaviors in humans

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Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine: By studying the genome of a kind of octopus not known for its friendliness toward its peers, then testing its behavioral reaction to a popular mood-altering drug called MDMA or “ecstasy,” scientists say they have found preliminary evidence of an evolutionary link between the social behaviors of the sea creature and humans, species separated by 500 million years on the evolutionary tree. A summary of the experiments is published Sept. 20 in Current Biology,…

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Living in ignorance about our ignorance

Living in ignorance about our ignorance

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Kaidi Wu and David Dunning write: In 1806, entrepreneur Frederic Tudor sailed to the island of Martinique with a precious cargo. He had harvested ice from frozen Massachusetts rivers and expected to make a tidy profit selling it to tropical customers. There was only one problem: the islanders had never seen ice. They had never experienced a cold drink, never tasted a pint of ice cream. Refrigeration was not a celebrated innovation, but an unknown concept. In their eyes, there…

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Loneliness is the common ground of terror and extremism

Loneliness is the common ground of terror and extremism

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Nabeelah Jaffer writes: A few years ago I discovered that my friend Tom was a white supremacist. This put me in a strange position: I am a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants. I am a member of one of the so-called invading groups that Tom fears and resents. He broadcasts his views from his social media accounts, which are a catalogue of aggrieved far-Right anger. One post warns ‘the Muslim invaders to keep their filthy hands off our women’….

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A theory of reality as more than the sum of its parts

A theory of reality as more than the sum of its parts

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Natalie Wolchover writes: In his 1890 opus, The Principles of Psychology, William James invoked Romeo and Juliet to illustrate what makes conscious beings so different from the particles that make them up. “Romeo wants Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as they,” James wrote. “But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite…

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud

The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud

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Brian Resnick writes: The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature. The study took paid participants and assigned them to be “inmates” or “guards” in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after the experiment began, the “guards” began mistreating the “prisoners,” implying evil is brought out by circumstance. The authors, in their conclusions, suggested innocent people, thrown into a situation where they…

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The spiritual part of our brains — religion not required

The spiritual part of our brains — religion not required

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Ephrat Livni writes: Scientists seek to quantify everything—even the ineffable. And so the human search for meaning recently took a physical turn as Columbia and Yale University researchers isolated the place in our brains that processes spiritual experiences. In a new study, published in Cerebral Cortex (paywall) on May 29, neuroscientists explain how they generated “personally relevant” spiritual experiences in a diverse group of subjects and scanned their brains while these experiences were happening. The results indicate that there is…

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It’s not my fault, my brain implant made me do it

It’s not my fault, my brain implant made me do it

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Probes that can transmit electricity inside the skull raise questions about personal autonomy and responsibility. Hellerhoff, CC BY-SA By Laura Y. Cabrera, Michigan State University and Jennifer Carter-Johnson, Michigan State University Mr. B loves Johnny Cash, except when he doesn’t. Mr. X has watched his doctors morph into Italian chefs right before his eyes. The link between the two? Both Mr. B and Mr. X received deep brain stimulation (DBS), a procedure involving an implant that sends electric impulses to…

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A revolution in our sense of self

A revolution in our sense of self

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Nick Chater writes: At the climax of Anna Karenina, the heroine throws herself under a train as it moves out of a station on the edge of Moscow. But did she really want to die? Had the ennui of Russian aristocratic life and the fear of losing her lover, Vronsky, become so intolerable that death seemed the only escape? Or was her final act mere capriciousness, a theatrical gesture of despair, not seriously imagined even moments before the opportunity arose?…

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