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Psychologists Interrupt the Miserable Cycle of Social Insecurity
Tom likes Susan but he fears she does not like him. Expecting to be rejected, he’s cold toward Susan. And guess what? She snubs him back. His prophesy is self-fulfilled, his social insecurity reinforced. The miserable cycle continues. But what if Tom could be helped to set aside his fears and behave as warmly as he feels? Happily, he can, says University of Victoria psychologist Danu Anthony Stinson.
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Social Acceptance and Rejection: The Sweet and the Bitter
Psychology researchers have long been interested in close relationships, but have only more recently begun investigating social exclusion.
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How The Visual System Constructs Moving Objects: One by One
Although our eyes record the word as millions of pixels, “the visual system is fantastic at giving us a world that looks like objects, not pixels,” says Northwestern University psychologist Steven L. Franconeri. It does this by grouping areas of the world with similar characteristics, such as color, shape, or motion. The process is so seamless that we feel we’re taking it all in simultaneously. But this, says a new study by Franconeri and his colleague Brian R. Levinthal, is “an illusion.” Instead, they say, that for some types of grouping, the visual system is limited by its ability to perceive only one group at a time.
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Spoiler Alert: Stories Are Not Spoiled by ‘Spoilers’
Many of us go to extraordinary lengths to avoid learning the endings of stories we have yet to read or see – plugging our ears, for example, and loudly repeating “la-la-la-la,” when discussion threatens to reveal the outcome. Of book and movie critics, we demand they not give away any plot twists or, at least, oblige with a clearly labeled “spoiler alert.” We get angry with friends who slip up and spill a fictional secret. But we’re wrong and wasting our time, suggests a new experimental study from the University of California, San Diego. People who flip to the last page of a book before starting it have the better intuition. Spoilers don’t spoil stories.
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Narcissists Look Like Good Leaders—But They Aren’t!
Narcissists rise to the top. That’s because other people think their qualities—confidence, dominance, authority, and self-esteem—make them good leaders. Is that true? “Our research shows that the opposite seems to be true,” says Barbora Nevicka, a PhD candidate in organizational psychology, describing a new study she undertook with University of Amsterdam colleagues Femke Ten Velden, Annebel De Hoogh, and Annelies Van Vianen. The study found that the narcissists’ preoccupation with their own brilliance inhibits a crucial element of successful group decision-making and performance: the free and creative exchange of information and ideas.
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Social Class as Culture
Social class is more than just how much money you have. It’s also the clothes you wear, the music you like, the school you go to—and has a strong influence on how you interact with others, according to the authors of a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. People from lower classes have fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world than people in upper classes—a fact that should figure into debates on public policy, according to the authors.