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False Confessions: A Current Matter of Life and Death
On April 27, Melissa Lucio is scheduled to be executed in Texas for the alleged murder of her 2-year-old daughter. APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Saul Kassin explains how the psychological science on false confessions relates to this life-or-death case.
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Detecting Bullshit
When Carl Bergstrom worked on plans to prepare the United States for a hypothetical pandemic, in the early 2000s, he and his colleagues were worried vaccines might not get to those who needed them most. “We thought the problem would be to keep people from putting up barricades and stopping the truck and taking all the vaccines off it, giving them to each other,” he recalls. When COVID-19 arrived, things played out quite differently. One-quarter of U.S. adults remain unvaccinated against a virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans.
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What the Second-Happiest People Get Right
In 2007, a group of researchers began testing a concept that seems, at first blush, as if it would never need testing: whether more happiness is always better than less. The researchers asked college students to rate their feelings on a scale from “unhappy” to “very happy” and compared the results with academic (GPA, missed classes) and social (number of close friends, time spent dating) outcomes. Though the “very happy” participants had the best social lives, they performed worse in school than those who were merely “happy.” ...
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Does Religion Make People More Ethical?
Do children need religion to grow into good people? Sixty-five percent of Americans think so. And even though younger adults have been leaving traditional faiths in droves, about 48% of them still hold this view. The result is a lot of conflicted parents. While they don’t necessarily miss going to church, synagogue or mosque, they do worry that without some sort of religious education, their kids might not grow into morally upstanding people. So while many leave formal religion behind in their 20s and 30s, they slowly, and often somewhat reluctantly, begin to return when they have kids.
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Review Proposals for the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes
Consider volunteering for the interdisciplinary panels that will review proposals submitted to NSF’s upcoming National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes competition.
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Video: Observing Earth Day With Psychological Science
In recognition of Earth Day 2022, we have collected and summarized flash talks that discuss the effects of nature-assisted rehabilitation on mental health, the risks of air pollution exposure during childhood, the motivations behind climate-related discussions, and more.
