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Countering “Neuromyths” in the Movies
After a head injury sustained in a plane crash, CIA assassin Jason Bourne wakes up floating in the Mediterranean Sea with two bullets in his back, a Swiss bank account code implanted in his hip, and no memory of who is or how he ended up in the open ocean. Bourne is afflicted with no memory whatsoever of his identity or life before the accident. Even with the severe retrograde amnesia Bourne experiences in the movie The Bourne Identity, it’s dubious that he would also lose all sense of his identity. In fact, complete memory loss after a head injury — often reversed after another blow to the head — is a common but rather preposterous representation of brain damage or amnesia.
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Increasing Individualism in US Linked with Rise of White-Collar Jobs
Rising individualism in the United States over the last 150 years is mainly associated with a societal shift toward more white-collar occupations, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The study, which looked at various cultural indicators — including word usage in books, trends in baby names, and shifts in family structure — suggests that a shift toward greater individualism is systematically correlated with socioeconomic trends, but not with trends in urbanization or environmental demands such as frequency of diseases or disasters.
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The new scientific revolution: Reproducibility at last
The Washington Post: Diederik Stapel, a professor of social psychology in the Netherlands, had been a rock-star scientist — regularly appearing on television and publishing in top journals. Among his striking discoveries was that people exposed to litter and abandoned objects are more likely to be bigoted. And yet there was often something odd about Stapel’s research. When students asked to see the data behind his work, he couldn’t produce it readily. And colleagues would sometimes look at his data and think: It’s beautiful. Too beautiful. Most scientists have messy data, contradictory data, incomplete data, ambiguous data. This data was too good to be true.
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Happier Tweets, Healthier Communities
Pacific Standard: Why does one community have higher levels of heart disease than another? Some of the reasons are obvious, such as income and education levels or local eating and exercise norms. But as epidemiologists have long argued, other likely factors are more ephemeral. Among them: how angry or content the residents tend to feel, and whether the environment fosters a sense of social connectedness. Measuring such things is tough, but newly published research reports telling indicators can be found in bursts of 140 characters or less.
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The Forgiveness Boost
The Atlantic: On New Year’s Eve in 1995, Frances McNeill, a 78-year-old woman who lived alone in Knoxville, Tennessee, went to bed early. Outside, someone watched the house lights flick off. Figuring its inhabitants were gone for the night, he made his move. McNeill awoke to the sound of the intruder rummaging through her bookshelves and drawers. She walked out of her bedroom and crept up behind him. He swiveled around, raised his crowbar high above his head, and bludgeoned McNeill to death. Afterward, he raped her with a wine bottle. The next morning, McNeill’s son, Mike, discovered her body on the blood-stained carpet.
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Using Smartphones and Apps to Enhance Loyalty Programs
The New York Times: Nearly as long as there have been coffee shops and carwashes, all manner of businesses have handed out buy-10-get-one-free punch cards and hoped to reap the rewards of this simplest of loyalty marketing campaigns. But a new day is dawning. Smartphones and loyalty apps have begun offering small businesses enhanced program features and automated administration capabilities once affordable only to large companies like airlines and hotel chains. These capabilities also offer the equivalent of a real-world psychology lab for easily evaluating the effects of offerings and incentives on customer loyalty.
