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The Brain Likes Categories. Where Should It Put Mixed-Race People?
NPR: Humans like to place things in categories and can struggle when things can't easily be categorized. That also applies to people, a study finds, and the brain's visual biases may play a role in perceptions of mixed-race people. The study, published in Psychological Science on Monday, asked people to sort images of people as either white or black, but it included multiracial faces in the mix, too. There has been much less research into attitudes about mixed-race people, even though they are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States. Read the whole story: NPR
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Why All the Violence at Donald Trump Rallies?
Pacific Standard: Video of a black protester getting sucker-punched at a Donald Trump rally in North Carolina has been widely circulating on the Internet. But it's only the most recent example of Trump opponents being roughed up at such events. What's behind this disturbing phenomenon? Let us put two and two together. ... Social psychologist Arlin James Benjamin conducted a survey of 150 university students that compared their attitudes toward violence with their level of right-wing authoritarianism. Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
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The Eternal Appeal of the Underdog
The New York Times: MOST casual college basketball fans can’t name a single player for long-shot Holy Cross, which is in the N.C.A.A. tournament this year with a losing record. We might not know who Stephen F. Austin is (known as the father of Texas, who gave his name to a university there) or that one school, ambitiously, calls its team the Governors (Austin Peay). But come March, we’re suddenly Governors fans. We want the underdog teams to beat the heavyweights like Kansas, Duke and Michigan State. We want the little guys to triumph. At least we think we do. There’s science behind this allure of the underdog.
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Do Medical Dramas Inhibit Reckless Driving?
Research on “risk-glorifying media exposure” has shown that movies like The Fast and the Furious can encourage risk-taking behavior, especially for teenagers. But can certain media reduce risky adolescent driving? In a new article, social scientist Kathleen Beullens (Leuven School for Mass Communication Research, Belgium) and psychological scientist Nancy Rhodes (The Ohio State University) discuss cultivation theory and how television can build a new reality in adolescents’ minds — one in which they may feel more or less comfortable taking risks.
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There’s a Better Way to Brainstorm
The team brainstorming session is a common way for drumming up new ideas but research suggests that they have one big problem: Group interactions, like brainstorming, can actually inhibit idea generation. APS Fellow Paul B. Paulus of the University of Texas at Arlington has studied creativity in groups, and his research suggests that brainstorming doesn’t actually work as well as people might think. “In face-to-face settings, the opportunity to fully share information and knowledge is limited by the fact that only one person can express his or her ideas at one time,” Paulus and colleagues write in a recent study.
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Real Fixes for Workplace Bias
The Wall Street Journal: Corporations, not-for-profit groups and governments spend billions of dollars every year on diversity training—without knowing whether the programs work. A review of almost 1,000 studies on interventions aimed at reducing prejudice found that most programs weren’t tested. For the few that were, including media campaigns and corporate-diversity training, the effects, wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and Donald P. Green of Yale in the Annual Review of Psychology (2009), “remain unknown.” ... What would it mean to transfer such insights to ordinary work environments? A good starting point is to ensure that the language in job advertisements is gender neutral.
