-
Gender Fairness Prevails in Most Fields of Academic Science
Women are significantly underrepresented in many science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, and attempts to understand why have only resulted in disagreement among researchers, the lay public, and policymakers. In a comprehensive new report, an interdisciplinary team of psychological scientists and economists aims to cut through the confusion, synthesizing available research and providing a host of new analyses to identify the factors that drive women's underrepresentation in STEM.
-
New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Jenny Yiend, Andrew Mathews, Tom Burns, Kevin Dutton, Andrés Fernández-Martín, George A. Georgiou, Michael Luckie, Alexandra Rose, Riccardo Russo, and Elaine Fox Studies examining anxiety-related attention bias have found differences in orienting mechanisms such as engagement and disengagement of attention for targets; however, much of this research has been conducted with subclinical samples.
-
One Scary Boss Can Spook the Whole Office
Coping with an abusive boss can have major impacts on employee well-being, and research has even shown that a bad boss can make people sick, leading to increased rates of heart attack, high blood pressure, anxiety, and chronic stress among employees. But a scary boss doesn’t just impact his or her immediate subordinates – new research from a team of psychological scientists led by Mary Bardes Mawritz of Drexel University shows that an abusive boss’s bad behavior can trickle down throughout the entire office.
-
Memrise Prize Aimed at Spurring Innovations in Language Learning
David Shanks and Rosalind Potts, scientists in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London, United Kingdom, have teamed up with the online learning community Memrise to tackle an age-old problem: how to learn a new language — fast. The $10,000 Memrise Prize challenges contestants to “create the most powerful methodology for memorizing new information.” Contestants will devise a 1-hour learning program to teach English speakers previously unfamiliar Lithuanian vocabulary. Those programs that perform well against a control method will pass to the next round of the contest to be reviewed by independent judges, including experts on memory and neuroscience.
-
Toddlers Copy Their Peers to Fit In, but Apes Don’t
From the playground to the board room, people often follow, or conform, to the behavior of those around them as a way of fitting in. New research shows that this behavioral conformity appears early in human children, but isn’t evidenced by apes like chimpanzees and orangutans. “Conformity is a very basic feature of human sociality. It retains in- and out-groups, it helps groups coordinate and it stabilizes cultural diversity, one of the hallmark characteristics of the human species,” says psychological scientist and lead researcher Daniel Haun of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the University of Jena.
-
Stand Out as a Leader By Bridging the CEO Pay Gap
Inc.: Are CEOs are properly compensated, compared to unskilled workers? If you think so, you're in the minority. That's one takeaway from recent research by Chulalongkorn University's Sorapop Kiatpongsan and Harvard Business School's Michael Norton. Their other key finding is a fascinating distillation of what people think CEOs should make compared to unskilled workers. Here are the numbers, according to Gretchen Gavett's superb summary on the Harvard Business Review blog: US-based respondents to the survey Kiatpongsan and Norton used believe that, ideally, CEOs should earn 6.7 times what unskilled workers earn.
