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How Startups Are Using Tech To Try And Fight Workplace Bias
NPR: We all harbor biases — subconsciously, at least. We may automatically associate men with law enforcement work, for example, or women with children and family. In the workplace, these biases can affect managers' hiring and promotion decisions. So when Pete Sinclair, who's chief of operations at the cybersecurity firm RedSeal, realized that — like many other Silicon Valley companies — his company had very few female engineers and few employees who weren't white, Chinese or Indian, he wanted to do something about it.
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Psychology Is Not in Crisis
The New York Times: IS psychology in the midst of a research crisis? An initiative called the Reproducibility Project at the University of Virginia recently reran 100 psychology experiments and found that over 60 percent of them failed to replicate — that is, their findings did not hold up the second time around. The results, published last week in Science, have generated alarm (and in some cases, confirmed suspicions) that the field of psychology is in poor shape. But the failure to replicate is not a cause for alarm; in fact, it is a normal part of how science works. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Why Men Still Edge Out Women in Tech Jobs
The world’s top tech companies have realized that unconscious bias is bad for business. Elite companies like Facebook and Google are worried that subtle prejudices—for example, the implicit attitude that men are better than women at math and science—are leading hiring managers to unwittingly skip over the most competent, qualified candidates. "The tech industry overall has this belief that it's the most meritocratic industry of all and that bias and discrimination do not have a home here,” said Brian Welle, director of people analytics at Google, in USA Today.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Impaired Retrieval Inhibition of Threat Material in Generalized Anxiety Disorder Katharina Kircanski, Douglas C. Johnson, Maria Mateen, Robert A. Bjork, and Ian H. Gotlib People with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) often experience intrusive thoughts and have a bias for threat-related information. One reason proposed for this is that people with GAD may have impaired retrieval inhibition for threat material. Participants with and without GAD were assessed for anxiety and completed a retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm.
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Waking Up to Dangers of Drowsy Driving
We need to wake up to the fact that sleep is a vital component to safe driving, says psychological scientist Frank McKenna of the University of Reading. The link between sleep and driving safety is
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Groups of People Spot Lies More Often Than Individuals Do
Scientific American: A shifty gaze, fidgety stance or sweaty palms signal a liar in classic film noirs. In real life, however, it is surprisingly difficult to recognize when someone is telling a tall tale. Even among trained professionals, the lie-detection accuracy rate is only slightly better than pure chance. And courts tend to reject polygraph evidence because the tests lack standardized questions for determining falsehoods. For better odds, discussions of questionable claims appear to be the way to go. Psychologists at the University of Chicago have found that groups of people are consistently more reliable at rooting out fabrications than chance or individual judges.
