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2019 RAND Summer Institute
The 26th Annual RAND Summer Institute (RSI) will take place July 8-11, 2019, in Santa Monica, CA. Application Deadline: March 15, 2019 The RSI will consist of two conferences addressing critical issues facing our aging population: the Mini-Medical School for Social Scientists on July 8-9 and the Demography, Economics, Psychology, and Epidemiology of Aging conference on July 10-11. Interested researchers can apply for financial support covering travel and accommodations. Visit RAND's website for more information and the application form: http://www.rand.org/labor/aging/rsi.html.
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How to Crush Your Habits in the New Year With the Help of Science
It’s the shiniest time of year: that hopeful period when we imagine how remarkable — how fit and kind, how fiscally responsible — our future selves could be. And while you may think “new year, new you” is nothing more than a cringey, magazine-cover trope, research supports its legitimacy. --- Imagine it’s the next New Year’s Eve. What change are you going to be most grateful you made? Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist and author of “The Willpower Instinct,” suggested asking yourself this question before making any resolutions. “It’s crazy to me how often people work from the opposite,” she said.
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New NIH Funding Opportunities Targeting Opioid Crisis
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has released a series of new funding opportunity announcements focused on the opioid crisis which may be of interest to the psychological science community. These opportunities, which are connected
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Our Social Judgments Reveal a Tension Between Morals and Statistics
People make statistically-informed judgments about who is more likely to hold particular professions even though they criticize others for the same behavior, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for
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Being friends with your boss has a downside
Given the hours invested, the intensity required, and the physical proximity forced upon us in this age of the open-floor-plan office, having friends at work may feel essential to one’s survival. Yet research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests there’s one office friendship that can have a costly unintended consequence. University of Chicago’s Alex Shaw, Hebrew University’s Shoham Choshen-Hillel and UCLA Anderson’s Eugene M. Caruso (who conducted this research while affiliated with University of Chicago) find that in certain office situations, managers feel compelled to be extra hard on a colleague who is also a friend.
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Is our constant use of digital technologies affecting our brain health? We asked 11 experts.
With so many of us now constantly tethered to digital technology via our smartphones, computers, tablets, and even watches, there is a huge experiment underway that we didn’t exactly sign up for. Companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, even Vox (if we’re being completely honest) are competing for our attention, and they’re doing so savvily, knowing the psychological buttons to push to keep us coming back for more. It’s now common for American kids to get a smartphone by age 10. That’s a distraction device they carry in their pockets all the time. The more adapted to the attention economy we become, the more we fear it could be hurting us.
