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What Do Polar Bears and Social Faux Pas Have in Common?
Scientific American: Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a psychological goldmine. If you can think it, chances are he wrote about it. But as far as I know, only once has his writing directly inspired psychological research—and it was his non-fiction at that. Specifically, his reminiscences of travels to the European continent, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. One chapter in particular, “An Essay Concerning the Bourgeois,” has sparked some of the most prominent social psychology research of the last twenty years: Daniel Wegner’s studies of thought suppression.
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The story of the self
The Guardian: Memory is our past and future. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. "Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, even our action." Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are. It's no surprise, then, that there is fascination with this quintessentially human ability.
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Want to Feel Taller? Become the Boss
Science: French president Nicolas Sarkozy (right) is only 5'5'' (1.65 meters), but he might not even be aware of it (although his raised heels speak otherwise). That's because power makes people feel taller than they really are, according to a new study. Researchers asked 49 volunteers to write about a time when they were in a position where they held authority over others, while another 49 were told to write about being in a submissive position. Then the researchers had the participants create avatars for themselves in a video game. Read the whole story: Science
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Helping Students Motivate Themselves
The New York Times: A recent Times article, “Motivating Students With Cash-for-Grades Incentive,” looks at efforts around the world to pay students for academic achievement. In it, Edward Deci, a psychologist at the University of Rochester and author of of “Why We Do What We Do,” is quoted: “It is easy to get people to do things by paying them if you’ve got enough money and they’ve got the necessary skills,” he said. “But they will keep doing it only as long as you keep paying them. And even if they were doing it before, when you stop paying them the behavior drops to a lower level than when you started paying them.
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Lads’ mags, sexism, and research in psychology: an interview with Dr. Peter Hegarty (part 1)
Scientific American: Back in December, there was a study that appeared in The British Journal of Psychology that got a fair amount of buzz. The paper looked at the influence that magazines aimed at young men (“lads’ mags”) might have on how the young people who read them perceive their social reality.
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The male paradox
Calgary Herald: Disturbing male-oriented crime stories were all over the news in 2011. So-called honour killings in Ontario. An Edmonton filmmaker convicted of a lethal luring that mimicked his film script. The allegations of torture and sexual assault against Calgary’s Dustin Paxton. And, of course, that testosterone- and alcohol-fuelled riot in Vancouver after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup to Boston. A fascinating article published in 2011 may give us some powerful insights into these tragedies. According to two University of South Florida psychologists, our manhood is actually a very fragile and precarious commodity. When it’s threatened, we’ll go to extreme lengths to defend it.
