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New Insights Into Eyewitness Memory From Groundbreaking Replication Initiative
A research replication initiative confirms earlier findings, showing that asking witnesses to provide a written description of a suspect can impair their ability to select that suspect from a lineup — the so-called “verbal overshadowing” effect.
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Why Jurors and Policemen Need Stress Relief
National Geographic: I’ll be sitting on a jury tomorrow for the first time. The logistics are annoying. I have to take an indefinite time off work, wait in long security lines at the courthouse, and deal with a constant stream of bureaucratic nonsense. But all that is dwarfed by excitement. And, OK, yes, some pride. My judgments will affect several lives in an immediate and concrete way. There’s a heaviness to that, a responsibility, that can’t be brushed aside. My focus on jury duty may be why a new study on social judgments caught my eye. Whether part of a jury or not, we judge other people’s behaviors every day.
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Cruise Control May Prevent Speeding, But Slow Reaction Times
As cars become increasingly automated, researchers are looking at who’s the better driver: the human or the car. Most cars and trucks now come equipped with cruise control--which allows a car to automatically maintain a constant speed without input from the driver--and many newer vehicles have advanced cruise control (ACC) systems that automatically adjust a car’s speed to maintain a safe distance from the car ahead. A recent study from psychological scientists Mark Vollrath, Susanne Schleicher, and Christhard Gelau found that cruise control and ACC systems can have both positive and negative effects on driving safety.
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Hooray for the Mundane! Ordinary Memories Are the Best
TIME: Never mind those dreamy recollections of your fab trip to Rome or that perfect night out last Valentine’s Day. Want a memory with some real sizzle? How about that time last week you went out for a tuna sandwich with the guy in the next cubicle? Or that trip to the supermarket on Sunday? Hot stuff, eh? Actually, yes. Ordinary memories, it turns out, may be a lot less ordinary than they seem — or at least a lot more memorable — according to a nifty new study published in the journal Psychological Science. And that can have some positive implications for our state of mind. Read the whole story: TIME
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Liking Work Really Matters
The New York Times: WE have all had to work on tasks we detest: Calculus homework, for example, is boring and hard. As soon as we start, we feel mentally exhausted, and the quality of our work suffers. Now imagine you are an aspiring architect. Learning how calculus can help you design more creative and ambitious structures could be fascinating. Instead of feeling exhausted by your homework, you might feel energized and could work on it all night. The same work, but with a very different psychological effect. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at the Claremont Graduate University, has been studying this latter phenomenon for decades.
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Why We Wonder Why
Scientific American: Humans are curious creatures, and our curiosity drives a search for explanations. So while this search may fit squarely in the realm of science, it is hardly confined to the pursuits of scientists and intellectuals. Even preschoolers ask why, and indeed may do so to the exasperation of adults. Yet adults seek to understand things, too. They want to know why their partner responded angrily to their request, why the train was late, or why the weather changed so suddenly. By helping us understand our environment, explanations give us some control over our lives.
