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What I Learned About Dogs and Love While Crossing the Country With My Lab
Slate: Casey and I stopped in Sarasota, Florida, to meet Cary, a woman who’d read about my journey and suggested that I come meet her black Lab, Pepe. I told her and her husband, Mike, about Piper, a dog I was going to meet that afternoon in Tampa. Piper had bitten a home intruder two years prior, only to have the robber stab her with a crowbar. “Poor dog,” Cary said. “If someone stabbed my dog, that would be like someone stabbing my child. To me, my pets are like my children. I love them the same.” Although I adore dogs, I’m surprised when I hear people equate their love for their pets with their love for their kids.
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The psychology of why little kids are completely obsessed with ‘Frozen’
The Washington Post: When the animated film “Frozen” was released last year, no one expected it to become a worldwide juggernaut. “Frozen,” which earned more than $1.2 billion at the box office, is not only the first “princess” movie to make the list of top 10 grossing animated films. Even more astonishingly, it is also the No. 1 animated film of all time. Talk about shattering the glass ceiling, or in this case, the glass slipper.
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Attitudes About Who Brings Home the Bacon Lag Behind Economic Reality
A team of psychological scientists hypothesized that people’s deep-rooted beliefs about gender roles may be slower to change than the major behavioral shifts evidenced within society and the workforce.
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Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions
The New York Times: The deaths of African-Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Cleveland and on Staten Island have reignited a debate about race. Some argue that these events are isolated and that racism is a thing of the past. Others contend that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, highlighting that skin color still has a huge effect on how people are treated. Arguments about race are often heated and anecdotal. As a social scientist, I naturally turn to empirical research for answers.
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Surprise!
Slate: If I could ensure that kids come away from science class with one thing only, it wouldn’t be a set of facts. It would be an attitude—something that the late physicist Richard Feynman called “scientific integrity,” the willingness to bend over backward to examine reasons your pet theories about the world might be wrong. “That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school,” Feynman said in a 1974 commencement speech. “We never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation.” ... In other words, we need to actively look for signs that our assumptions are wrong, because we won’t do so unprompted.
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Benjamin Voyer on the psychology of teamwork
The Economist: How would you describe the psychology of teamwork? The study of teamwork began with the emergence of social psychology and an interest in how groups behave, particularly as against another group. This is the idea of having an “in group” that you’re a member of and that becomes part of your social identity, and then the “out group” against which you discriminate and define yourself. It has developed into its own field of organisational psychology. We’ve looked at how groups form against each other and what happens to an individual voice in the team. We wonder how we make a team more efficient and also what the risks are of having teams.
