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What Choice Do We Have?
Too much choice can be a bad thing—not just for the individual, but for society. Thinking about choices makes people less sympathetic to others and less likely to support policies that help people, according to a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In the U.S., important policy debates are often framed in terms of choice, such as whether people get to choose their own healthcare plan and a school for their children. "When Hurricane Katrina happened, people asked, why did those people choose to stay?" says Krishna Savani of Columbia University.
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How Well Do You Know Your Friends?
Some people know their friends’ triggers well; others have almost no idea what set their friends off. Research suggests that this difference has a noticeable impact on the relationship.
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New Research From Psychological Science
On the Strength of Connections Between Localist Mental Modules as a Source of Frequency-of-Occurrence Effects Derek Besner, Sarah Moroz, and Shannon O’Malley How do people become familiar with items and events that appear frequently in their lives? To test potential mechanisms, the reaction times to numerical stimuli presented in either Arabic numerals (the more frequent form in which numbers are presented) or words (less frequent) were compared in different tasks. There was a difference in the reaction times between the two formats for a parity judgment task (in which participants indicated whether a number was odd or even) but not for a test in which participants read each stimulus aloud.
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Does Belief in Free Will Lead to Action?
Free will may be an illusion. Yet we persist in believing we are the masters of our fates—and that belief affects how we act. Think you determine the course of your life and you’re likely to work harder toward your goals and feel better about yourself too. Think you don’t, and you’re likelier to behave in ways that fulfill that prophesy. “Folk psychology tells us if you feel in control, you perform better,” says Davide Rigoni, an experimental psychologist now at the University of Marseille.
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Think You’ll Ace That Test? Think Again. Then Start Studying
How we feel when encountering information that we’re trying to learn biases our ability to predict what we’ll remember.
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Chicken Soup for the Soul: Comfort Food Fights Loneliness
People who were generally secure in their relationships were able to mitigate feelings of loneliness by writing about a comfort food.