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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of new research exploring: language, social categories, and sentencing decision making; genetic and environmental contributors to both math achievement and broader academic achievement; new statistical techniques for exploring links between birth order and personality.
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Episode 803: Nudge, Nudge, Nobel
Economists used to assume that people were, overall, rational. They may make mistakes now and then, but, if reasonably informed, they do the right thing. Then came Richard Thaler, who, in October, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. While Thaler was teaching at the University of Rochester, he had a side gig. Not a lot of people knew about it or took it seriously. He would catalog ways people behaved irrationally. And Thaler thought, there must be a way to make sense of this behavior, to understand it and to predict it. This list led him to psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
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Getting rid of the negative stereotypes — and biases — about aging
What can be done about negative stereotypes that portray older adults as out of touch, useless, feeble, incompetent, pitiful and irrelevant? With late-night TV comedy shows where supposedly clueless older people are the butt of jokes and with ads for anti-aging creams equating youth with beauty and wrinkles with decay, harsh and unflattering images shape assumptions about aging. Although people may hope for good health and happiness, they tend to believe that growing older involves deterioration and decline, according to reports from the Reframing Aging Initiative.
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Praising a Preschooler for Being Smart Can Backfire, International Study Finds
Telling a child how smart he or she is comes naturally to a lot of parents and early-childhood educators, but a new study of preschool children in China suggests that may do more harm than good. The study was published in September in the journal Psychological Science. It found that praising young children for their intelligence promoted cheating. A team of international researchers led by Li Zhou, a professor at Hangzhou Normal University in the Zhejiang Province in east China, conducted an experiment with 300 preschool children in eastern China. Half of the children were 3 years old, and the other half were 5 years old.
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Kids, Would You Please Start Fighting?
When Wilbur and Orville Wright finished their flight at Kitty Hawk, Americans celebrated the brotherly bond. The brothers had grown up playing together, they had been in the newspaper business together, they had built an airplane together. They even said they “thought together.” These are our images of creativity: filled with harmony. Innovation, we think, is something magical that happens when people find synchrony together. The melodies of Rodgers blend with the lyrics of Hammerstein. It’s why one of the cardinal rules of brainstorming is “withhold criticism.” You want people to build on one another’s ideas, not shoot them down. But that’s not how creativity really happens.
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COS Holds $1 Million Preregistration Challenge
On Your Mark, Get Set, Preregister! The Center for Open Science (COS) is offering 1,000 psychological scientists $1,000 as part of its $1 Million Preregistration Challenge. Prizes will be awarded on January 1, July 1, and December 31 of 2018. To be eligible for the challenge, researchers must preregister their study plans through the Open Science Framework to publicly distinguish hypothesis-generating exploratory research from hypothesis-testing confirmatory research in their work. After the study has been published in a journal online, researchers can submit the article to the COS for review and claim their prize.
