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Staring Contests Are Automatic: People Lock Eyes to Establish Dominance
Imagine that you're in a bar and you accidentally knock over your neighbor's beer. He turns around and stares at you, looking for confrontation. Do you buy him a new drink, or do you try to outstare him to make him back off? New research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that the dominance behavior exhibited by staring someone down can be reflexive. Our primate relatives certainly get into dominance battles; they mostly resolve the dominance hierarchy not through fighting, but through staring contests. And humans are like that, too. David Terburg, Nicole Hooiveld, Henk Aarts, J.
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Making the ‘Irrelevant’ Relevant to Understand Memory and Aging
Age alters memory. But in what ways, and why? These questions comprise a vast puzzle for neurologists and psychologists. A new study looked at one puzzle piece: how older and younger adults encode and recall distracting, or irrelevant, information. The results, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science, can help scientists better understand memory and aging. “Our world contains so much information; we don’t always know which is relevant and which is irrelevant,” said Nigel Gopie, who cowrote the study with Fergus I.M. Craik and Lynn Hasher, all from the University of Toronto’s Rotman Research Institute.
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Mean Girls and Queen Bees: Females Under Threat of Social Exclusion Respond by Excluding Others First
Many studies have suggested that males tend to be more physically and verbally aggressive than females. According to a new study, to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, it may not be the case that women are less competitive than men—they may just be using a different strategy to come out ahead. Specifically, women may rely more on indirect forms of aggression, such as social exclusion. To investigate how men and women respond when faced with a social threat, psychological scientist Joyce F.
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People With Low Self-Esteem Show More Signs of Prejudice
When people are feeling badly about themselves, they're more likely to show bias against people who are different. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how that works. “This is one of the oldest accounts of why people stereotype and have prejudice: It makes us feel better about ourselves,” says Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis, who wrote the study with Thomas Allen.
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Following the Crowd: Brain Images Offer Clues to How and Why We Conform
What is conformity? A true adoption of what other people think—or a guise to avoid social rejection? Scientists have been vexed sorting the two out, even when they’ve questioned people in private. Now three Harvard University psychological scientists have used brain scans to show what happens when we take others’ opinions to heart: We take them “to brain”—specifically, to the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens. These regions compute what we value and feel rewarded by, both primitive things like water and food and socially meaningful things like money.
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Are We More—or Less—Moral Than We Think?
If asked whether we’d steal, most of us would say no. Would we try to save a drowning person? That depends—perhaps on our fear of big waves. Much research has explored the ways we make moral decisions. But in the clinch, when the opportunity arises to do good or bad, how well do our predictions match up with the actions we actually take? A study by Rimma Teper, Michael Inzlicht, and Elizabeth Page-Gould of the University of Toronto Scarborough tested the difference between moral forecasting and moral action—and the reasons behind any mismatch.