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Casting light on cheating and greed
Louis Brandeis was already one of America’s most famous lawyers when Woodrow Wilson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1916. He was a tireless and prescient critic of big investment banks—including bankers’ excessive bonuses—an argument he spelled out in his influential book of essays, Other People’s Money and How Bankers Use It. His solution for the problem of concentrated financial power was unfettered public scrutiny, a belief he summarized in his famous statement: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Justice Brandeis was an intuitive psychologist.
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Talking Your Way to Happiness: Well-being Is Related to Having Less Small Talk and More Substantive Conversations
Is a happy life filled with trivial chatter or reflective and profound conversations? Psychological scientists Matthias R. Mehl, Shannon E. Holleran, and C. Shelby Clark from the University of Arizona, along with Simine Vazire of Washington University in St. Louis investigated whether happy and unhappy people differ in the types of conversations they tend to engage in. Volunteers wore an unobtrusive recording device called the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) over four days. This device periodically records snippets of sounds as participants go about their lives.
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An angry voter is an ignorant voter
Imagine this scenario: You lost your job at the lumber yard early in 2009. Nobody is building new homes these days, and this slowdown has trickled down to suppliers all over the country. What’s worse, you’re dipping into savings just to make your own mortgage payments—on a house that has lost a big chunk of its value. In short, your American dream is in shambles. It’s a dreary but all too familiar scenario. Now imagine further how you feel about this. Is worry your primary emotion? Are you anxious about your wife’s health, and the possibility of an expensive hospitalization? Are you fearful about depleting your kids’ college funds? Where will you all live if you lose the house?
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Darkness Increases Dishonest Behavior
Darkness can conceal identity and encourage moral transgressions; thus Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “Worship” in The Conduct of Life (1860), “as gaslight is the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.” New research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that darkness may also induce a psychological feeling of illusory anonymity, just as children playing “hide and seek” will close their eyes and believe that other cannot see them, the experience of darkness, even one as subtle as wearing a pair of sunglasses, triggers the belief that we are warded from others’ attention and inspections.
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The perils of small talk
The Greek philosopher Socrates famously claimed that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” to which the 20th-century American philosopher Daniel Dennett replied: “The overly examined life is nothing to write home about either.” Fair enough. Deep thoughts have their place, and we all like to exercise our intellectual chops time to time. But much of life is not profound, and many of our thoughts and conversations are taken up with the rather mundane business of daily life: Nice dress. What’s for dinner? Have you seen Avatar? How about them Redskins? But is there a proper and healthy balance? Are there consequences to being too serious all the time—or too shallow?
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Does the Devil Really Wear Prada? The Psychology of Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization
People talk to their plants, pray to humanlike gods, name their cars, and even dress their pets up in clothing. We have a strong tendency to give nonhuman entities human characteristics (known as anthropomorphism), but why? In a new report in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Adam Waytz from Harvard University and Nicholas Epley and John T. Cacioppo from University of Chicago, examine the psychology of anthropomorphism.
