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How Trustworthy Is The Voice of Your GPS?
One goal of the voice-based GPS directions is to ensure that drivers are able to keep their eyes and attention on the road while navigating. But how do people respond when the navigation instructions come from Yoda, Mr. T, or Burt Reynolds? New research from psychological scientists David R. Large and Gary E. Burnett of University of Nottingham suggests that drivers’ decision making and behavior on the road can be influenced by the voice of their GPS. Driving directions from a Jedi Master may be hilarious, but drivers don’t necessarily believe the Force is strong with their GPS when the navigation directions come from Yoda.
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In Praise of Spacing Out
New York Magazine: The only time I’ve ever missed a flight, I was physically at the airport. But my mind was … not. I was wandering through the bookstore, lost in thought, my daydreams apparently intense enough to drown out both the final boarding call and my own name over the paging system. This kind of stuff happens to me with disheartening regularity, and it’s something I feel especially bad about these days, now that mindfulness — the ability to tether your thoughts to the present moment — has become such a huge part of the cultural conversation.
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International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology
The International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology will be held 2–5 August 2016 in Brisbane, Australia. The call for submissions is open, and the abstract deadline is 9 November 2015. For more information, visit icttp2016.com.
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A Musical Fix for American Schools
The Wall Street Journal: American education is in perpetual crisis. Our students are falling ever farther behind their peers in the rest of the world. Learning disabilities have reached epidemic proportions, affecting as many as one in five of our children. Illiteracy costs American businesses $80 billion a year. Many solutions have been tried, but few have succeeded. So I propose a different approach: music training. A growing body of evidence suggests that music could trump many of the much more expensive “fixes” that we have thrown at the education system. Plenty of outstanding achievers have attributed at least some of their success to music study.
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Amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experiences make us social misfits
The Boston Globe: As anyone who has signed on to Facebook recently can see, social media takes the propensity for sharing extraordinary experiences to the maximum. A Facebook feed can read like a list of epic moments from friends near and far: a gnarly mountain bike ride; an exquisite meal in Italy; a celebrity sighting. But a new study led by a Harvard researcher suggests that the human desire to share out-of-the-ordinary experiences with others may amount to a fundamental miscalculation of what brings people together — and could even be a social liability.
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Geteilter Schmerz verbindet sogar Wildfremde (Shared pain even connects strangers)
Die Welt: Geteilter Schmerz, so unangenehm er auch sein mag, kann positive soziale Folgen haben. Das berichten Brock Bastian und seine Kollegen von der University of New South Wales in dem Fachmagazin in "Psychological Science". Geteilter Schmerz stärke den Zusammenhalt und die Solidarität unter den Gruppenmitgliedern, so die Forscher – und zwar selbst dann, wenn diese sich zuvor gänzlich fremd gewesen waren. Für diese Erkenntnis musste eine ganze Reihe von Versuchspersonen mehr oder weniger stark leiden.
