-
New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds Marco F. H. Schmidt, Lucas P. Butler, Julia Heinz, and Michael Tomasello Children live in a social world, and that world has norms relating to behavior. Studies of how children learn these norms often explicitly instruct the children, indicating that an observed behavior is the "right way" to perform an action. The researchers examined whether children would naturally infer behavioral norms without explicit instruction.
-
Improving Research Practices, From Beginning to End
A series of articles focused on improving research practices at various points of the process, from deciding how to optimize the design of a single study to conducting a comprehensive evaluation of an entire research topic.
-
Why You Should Break Up With Your Smartphone During Lunch Breaks
Scrolling through apps on a smartphone might actually sap cognitive resources rather than restoring them during breaks.
-
Framing Spatial Tasks as Social Eliminates Gender Differences
Women underperform on spatial tests when they don’t expect to do as well as men, but framing the tests as social tasks eliminates the gender gap in performance, according to new findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The results show that women performed just as well as their male peers when the spatial tests included human-like figures. “Our research suggests that we may be underestimating the abilities of women in how we measure spatial thinking,” says postdoctoral researcher Margaret Tarampi of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
-
Spelke Awarded Heineken Prize
APS William James Fellow Elizabeth S. Spelke of Harvard University, a leading psychological scientist and specialist on the cognitive development of infants, recently received the C. L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Sciences from the
-
Using the Wisdom of Crowds to Improve Hiring
The British statistician Francis Galton applied statistical methods to many different subjects during the 1800s, including the use of fingerprinting for identification, correlational calculus, twins, blood transfusions, criminality, meteorology and, perhaps most famously, human intelligence. Galton, who was an ardent eugenicist, believed that intelligence was a trait that only a minority of elite individuals possessed. The majority of common people, he believed, were not very competent decision-makers. To put his theories to the test, Galton ran a famous experiment designed to analyze whether groups of common people were capable of making accurate choices.
