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Expectations influences outcomes
United Press International: Suggestion -- a rabbit's foot or a lucky coin -- can influence how people perform on learning and memory tasks, New Zealand and U.S researchers said. Maryanne Garry and Robert Michael of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and Irving Kirsch of Harvard Medical School in Boston said the powerful and persuasive effect that suggestion has relies on a person's "response expectancies," or the ways in which people anticipate responses in various situations. These expectations set people up for automatic responses that actively influence how people get to the outcome expected, the researchers said.
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Barbara A. Spellman on the Impact of Perspectives on Psychological Science
Science Watch: In a recent analysis of Essential Science Indicators (a subset of the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge), the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science was named a Rising Star in the field of Psychiatry/Psychology. Its current record in this field includes 227 papers cited a total of 2,020 times between January 1, 2001 to February 29, 2012. Perspectives on Psychological Science is published by the Association for Psychological Science, Washington, DC. The journal is edited by Barbara A. Spellman, Professor of Psychology and Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. Below, ScienceWatch.com talks with Spellman about the journal’s history and citation record.
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Why Smart People Are Stupid
The New Yorker: Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.) For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking.
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Diamond Jubilee: Why The ‘Right Kind Of Patriotism’ Benefits Health
Huffington Post: Ignore those twinges of cynicism and embrace your inner patriot this weekend, as studies regularly show that nationalism makes people happy. However, how happy you feel also depends on what you’re taking pride in, noted researchers earlier this year. In a report for Psychological Science, Matthew Wright, a political scientist at American University, and Tim Reeskens, a sociologist from Catholic University in Belgium found that more national pride correlated with greater personal wellbeing. But they also noticed that those individuals who connected nationalism with respect for a country’s institutions and values, rather than race or religion, were the most content.
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Looks Overshadow Reputation When Deciding Who To Trust
LiveScience: When faced with a decision of who to trust with money, people will often choose the face that looks the most trustworthy, shunning those who they deem look sketchy. Interestingly, a new study shows that the person's track record doesn't impact this choice — people will still choose the most trustworthy face, even if they are told that the owner of that face has a bad reputation. "The temptation to judge strangers by their faces is hard to resist.
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The Healthy Poor: Demystifying John Henry
The Huffington Post: John Henry is one of the big men of American folklore, a former slave and "steel drivin' man" who helped pioneer the American frontier in the 19th century. According to legend, John Henry was a man of extraordinary physical prowess who wielded a sledge hammer to clear the way for the nation's expanding railroads. He was also a man of extraordinary determination. When the railroad owner threatened to replace men and their muscles with a new steam-driven hammer, John Henry challenged owner and machine to a contest of strength. He won, but lost, dying of exhaustion. That's the John Henry story most Americans know.
