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Can the Psychological Technique of ‘Pre-Conformity’ Help Change Our Harmful Behaviors?
Psychologists have found a simple trick to reduce meat consumption in restaurants. Tell a customer that other people are increasingly choosing the menu's meatless options, and the customer becomes more likely to order a vegetarian meal. It's a simple but effective intervention that relies on peer pressure and social influence to convince people to rethink their longstanding habits, says Gregg Sparkman, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Stanford University who led the experiment. Essentially, Sparkman's findings show that you can change a person's behavior by highlighting other people's success in changing their behaviors.
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There’s No Innocent Way to Ask Your Son or Daughter About Grandkids
This summer, my family has been spending a month at the beach. It’s been like a daydream come to life: bright days and languid evenings spent with family, including a sparkly 3-year-old and her serene new baby sister. My granddaughters. I started picturing—and pining for—this kind of family gathering, the three-generation kind that includes grandchildren, as my 60s loomed and my two daughters entered their 30s with no obvious plans for baby-making. I’d kept to a pretty brisk schedule when I became a mother; I had both of my girls before I turned 30.
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You 2.0: When Did Marriage Become So Hard?
Marriage is hard. In fact, there's evidence it's getting even harder. Eli Finkel, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, argues that's because our expectations of marriage have increased dramatically in recent decades. "[A] marriage that would have been acceptable to us in the 1950s is a disappointment to us today because of those high expectations," he says. The flip side of that disappointment, of course, is a marriage that's pretty amazing.
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Myth: Eyewitness Testimony is the Best Kind of Evidence
Activities in this unit reveal how eyewitness testimony is subject to unconscious memory distortions and biases even among the most confident of witnesses.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Linguistic Synchrony Predicts the Immediate and Lasting Impact of Text-Based Emotional Support Bruce P. Doré and Robert R. Morris Emotional support is critical to well-being, but the factors that influence the effectiveness of such support are not completely understood.
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About the Model
Promoting active student engagement in critical/scientific thinking about behavior and mental processes.
