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Why People Choose to Cooperate, According to Behavioral Science
People stop their cars simply because a little light turns from green to red. They crowd onto buses, trains and planes with complete strangers, yet fights seldom break out. Large, strong men routinely walk right past smaller, weaker ones without demanding their valuables. People pay their taxes and donate to food banks and other charities. Most of us give little thought to these everyday examples of cooperation. But to biologists, they’re remarkable — most animals don’t behave that way. “Even the least cooperative human groups are more cooperative than our closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos,” says Michael Muthukrishna, a behavioral scientist at the London School of Economics.
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Doing Good and Taking Chances: Winning Entrepreneurship Posters Explore Business Mindsets
Chen Ji and James Wages receive the 2023 Psychological Science and Entrepreneurship Poster Award, supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
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I Jumped Out of a Plane to Learn the Benefits of Stress
I’m sitting in the back of the plane when the pilot announces we’ve reached maximum altitude. One of the crew gets up and – somewhat theatrically – slides open the side of the plane. In ones and twos, we shuffle towards the open door. When it comes to my turn, standing on the edge of a two-mile vertical drop, I’m more terrified than I’ve ever been. Thankfully, as a first-time jumper, I’m strapped to an experienced parachutist who will guide us down. I don’t even have to take the next step. But my brain is screaming at me not to go through with it. Behind me, my instructor gently pulls my head back so I can hear his reassuring words over the roaring wind.
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Women in Science Are Doing All Right
The toy maker Mattel recently honored International Women’s Day by making “role model dolls” of women in science, tech, engineering and math jobs, while lamenting that “girls are systemically tracked away from STEM.” It’s a cliché that these fields are rife with sexism, but at least in academia the data disagree, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
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They May Be Just Acquaintances. They’re Important to You Anyway.
Victoria Tirondola and Lam Gong first struck up a conversation last spring at the dog run in Brookdale Park in Bloomfield, N.J., when they realized that each owned a dog named Abby. Ms. Tirondola, 65, an insurance sales representative who lives in nearby Cedar Grove, has a tiny bichon-poodle mix. Mr. Gong’s Abby, older and portlier, is a terrier-beagle. They chatted about dogs at first. Then they learned that they both cooked, so “we talked about food and restaurants,” said Mr. Gong, 67, a retiree living in Clifton. “And how much better my cooking is than his,” put in Ms. Tirondola.
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A Decoder That Uses Brain Scans to Know What You Mean — Mostly
Scientists have found a way to decode a stream of words in the brain using MRI scans and artificial intelligence. The system reconstructs the gist of what a person hears or imagines, rather than trying to replicate each word, a team reports in the journal Nature Neuroscience. "It's getting at the ideas behind the words, the semantics, the meaning," says Alexander Huth, an author of the study and an assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at The University of Texas at Austin. This technology can't read minds, though. It only works when a participant is actively cooperating with scientists.
