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Here’s Why Some People Are More Religious Than Others
TIME: When it comes to predicting the kind of people most likely to be religious, brainiac scientists used to be everyone’s last guess. The more educated a person was, the thinking went, the more likely they were to question the supernatural. But the supposed divide between science and religion—in which religion was seen as the less-educated person’s “science” of choice—has ironically been subject to little scientific debate, until recently. ... David Rand, who leads Yale University’s Human Cooperation Laboratory and studies decision-making, was one of the first to suggest that intuition and deliberation were key to a person’s religiosity in a paper he co-wrote in 2011.
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The winning Cubs and the psychology of ‘we’
Chicago Tribune: I was leaving the Tribune Tower on Tuesday afternoon as the Cubs were playing and heard a collective cheer from a nearby restaurant. I jumped in a taxi and the driver had the game blaring on the radio. And when I entered the building where I was going, security guards and others were huddled over their smartphones getting updates. By the time I left, the Cubs had won the National League Division Series 3-1, beating the St. Louis Cardinals. Jubilant strangers were high-fiving one another and spreading the news: "We won! We won!" ... I talked to Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a blogger for Psychology Today.
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23rd Biennial Congress on Human Ethology
The 23rd Biennial Congress on Human Ethology, sponsored by the International Society for Human Ethology (ISHE) and the University of Stirling, will be held at the University of Stirling, Scotland, from August 1–5, 2016. The 2016 academic program will include several invited speakers, other oral presentations, and a poster session. Confirmed plenary speakers include Malinda Carpenter, Robin Dunbar, David Perrett and Benoist Schaal. The cultural program will include a banquet dinner and extracurricular activities. ISHE provides financial support for students who are first author presenters of accepted conference proposals.
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Current Directions in Psychological Science
Current Directions in Psychological Science: Volume 24, Number 5 Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, publishes reviews by leading experts covering all of scientific psychology and its applications. (Baby)Talk to Me: The Social Context of Infant-Directed Speech and Its Effects on Early Language Acquisition Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Dilara Deniz Can, Melanie Soderstrom, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek Physiological Arousal and Its Dysregulation in Child Maladjustment Angela Scarpa Chimpanzee Cognitive Control Michael J. Beran Personality Traits in Childhood and Adolescence: Structure, Development, and Outcomes Christopher J.
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A Short History of Empathy
The Atlantic: In a column for The New York Times this past January, Nicholas Kristof lamented what he called the country’s “empathy gap,” imploring his readers to grasp the complex circumstances that could plunge someone into poverty. Meanwhile, the psychologist Paul Bloom has argued that a sense of empathy can actually be “parochial [and] bigoted,” making it so “the whole world cares more about a little girl stuck in a well than they do about the possible deaths of millions and millions due to climate change.” ... By mid-century, empathy’s definition began to shift as some psychologists turned their attention to the science of social relations.
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Waiting on an email? Why it takes some people SO long to respond
TODAY: It seems as if you sent that email to your boss forever ago (or precisely 53 minutes ago). Why won't she respond? Maybe she won't grant your vacation time. Maybe you shouldn't have made that joke. It could simply be a generational difference. A recent study finds that email response time varies greatly by age and the older a person is, the fewer emails she will answer. ... "We expect someone to acknowledge us," says Pamela Rutledge, direct of the Media Psychology Research Center, who was not involved in the study.
