-
Surprising Psychology Can Make the Country Healthier
Scientific American: Public health communications are designed to tackle significant medical issues such as obesity, AIDS, and cancer. For example, what message can best combat the growing obesity epidemic? Are educational messages effective at increasing condom use? Should cancer prevention messages stress the health risks of too much sun exposure? These are not just medical problems. These are fundamentally questions about perception, beliefs, and behavior. Psychologists bring a unique expertise to these questions and are finding consequential, and often non-intuitive, answers. Read the whole story: Scientific American
-
Cool Kids Lose, Though It May Take A Few Years
NPR: Parents, teachers and cheesy after-school specials have long tried to convince kids that being cool and popular isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Now scientists are chiming in as well. Dating, flouting authority and surrounding yourself with good-looking friends may make you popular when you're 13, according to a study published online Wednesday. But don't believe the media hype, psychologists say. Kids who try to act cool in early adolescence are more likely to have problems with drugs and alcohol, and have trouble managing friendships as they grow older. And their popularity tends to fade by the time they're 22. Read the whole story: NPR
-
Redskin Psychology: The Origins of Cruel Caricatures
The Huffington Post: On prime time TV this week, during halftime of the NBA playoff game, the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation of California ran a paid advertisement to protest cultural stereotyping of Native Americans. The two-minute clip was a series of images, each associated with a spoken word: soldier, doctor, spiritualist, son, daughter, patriot, rancher, struggling, resilient, Sioux, Pueblo, Apache, Blackfoot, and more. The video ended with these words: "Native Americans call themselves many things. The one they don't..." This sentence ended as the final image occupied the screen: the logo of the Washington Redskins.
-
An Office for Introverts
The Atlantic: Open offices were supposed to liberate us from cubicle-land. In the 1960s, the German design group Quickborner decided that grouping desks together would increase efficiency and de-emphasize status. They dubbed it Bürolandschaft, or “office landscape." Open plans are also meant to enhance collaboration: Perhaps overhearing your colleague's every mutter will lead to some serendipitous insights. ("Eureka! Steve, too, can't get Twitter to load.") But we've long since entered the backlash phase. "A cost-effective panopticon,"sneered one commenter on the tech site Y Combinator.
-
Stand Up for Better Meetings
In the wake of recent studies showing the health consequences of prolonged sitting, many professionals have begun standing at their work stations, and even in meetings. New research shows that eschewing a chair has a profound effect on group productivity. Standing during meetings boosts the excitement around creative group processes and reduces people's tendency to defend their turf, according to the study. Behavioral researchers Andrew Knight and Markus Bauer of Washington University wanted to explore the group dynamics that arose in meetings without chairs. They designed an experiment in which participants work in teams for 30 minutes to develop and record a university recruitment video.
-
Minimizing Belief in Free Will May Lessen Support for Criminal Punishment
Exposure to information that diminishes free will, including brain-based accounts of behavior, seems to decrease people’s support for retributive punishment, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. People who learned about neuroscientific research, either by reading a magazine article or through undergraduate coursework, proposed less severe punishment for a hypothetical criminal than did their peers. The findings suggest that they did so because they saw the criminal as less blameworthy.
