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Eleanor Maccoby, 1917-2018
APS William James Fellow Eleanor E. Maccoby, widely considered to be one of the most influential psychological scientists of the 20th century, passed away December 11 at the age of 101. She is recognized worldwide for her research on gender development and differentiation and parent-child relationships. Maccoby was the first woman to serve as chair of Stanford University’s Department of Psychology, holding that position from 1973 to 1976. At Stanford, she was associated with the university’s Center for the Study of Families, Children and Youth, where she became known for research on the social and intellectual development in children.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring how we make and perceive Bayesian judgments, visual attention and objective perception, and pupillary contagion in autism.
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The Dark Triad and the Evolution of Jerks
A great deal of recent research on evolution focuses on altruism—the tendency of creatures to help others, often at great cost to themselves. This is especially true of human beings, who help one another for a variety of good evolutionary reasons. For instance, people help kin, which is a way of preserving the genes that they share. People help others who are likely to help them back. But the prevalence of altruism also raises an evolutionary paradox: If evolution has selected humans to be nice and kind, how do we explain the high prevalence of jerks?
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Hide Your Phone When You’re Trying to Work. Seriously.
As I type this, my iPhone is tucked away inside my desk drawer under lock and key. It’s been there all day, completely out of sight. I’m slightly anxious about the notifications I might be missing, but only slightly; it’s a manageable level that’s not distracting. Yes, it’s a little extreme to lock your phone in a drawer. But I’ve learned that it’s the only way I can truly focus and be as productive as I want to be. And unfortunately, the same is true for you, even if you don’t realize it — or want to believe it.
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White liberals dumb themselves down when they speak to black people, a new study contends
You have recently joined a book club. Before each meeting, one member of the literary collective sends an email to the club secretary offering a few thoughts on the assigned text. This month, it’s your turn to compose the brief review. A new study suggests that the words you use may depend on whether the club secretary’s name is Emily (“a stereotypically White name,” as the study says) or Lakisha (“a stereotypically Black name”). If you’re a white liberal writing to Emily, you might use words like “melancholy” or “euphoric” to describe the mood of the book, whereas you might trade these terms out for the simpler “sad” or “happy” if you’re corresponding with Lakisha.
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Could consciousness all come down to the way things vibrate?
Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and an infinity of objects? How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there? Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A gnat? A bacterium? These questions are all aspects of the ancient “mind-body problem,” which asks, essentially: What is the relationship between mind and matter? It’s resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years. The mind-body problem enjoyed a major rebranding over the last two decades.
