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Extremist Groups Appeal to Those Uncertain About Identity
In a world threatened by extremist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Boko Haram, many people wonder what pull such violent, fear-mongering organizations have over their followers. In a new Current Directions in Psychological Science article, APS Fellow Michael A. Hogg, describes a theory explaining why people with no previous record of violence or extremist views might be joining these causes. Hogg proposes that “uncertainty-identity theory” — the role uncertainty plays in motivating people to join a social group to feel accepted — could be a contributing factor pushing people toward fringe groups — whether ideological, religious, or political.
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Infants Can Tell If You’re a Reliable Informant
It’s hard to know how babies think, since they’re still getting a handle on language skills. One strategy that researchers use to gain some insight is eye tracking, which allows them to see where babies direct their gaze and for how long. In light of research suggesting that children trust other people’s testimony based on prior experience with them, psychological scientist Kristen Swan Tummeltshammer of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London and colleagues conducted two experiments to determine whether infants could discern a person’s trustworthiness and act on this knowledge — a crucial skill for successful learning.
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International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology
The International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology will be held 2–5 August 2016 in Brisbane, Australia. The call for submissions is open, and the abstract deadline is 9 November 2015. For more information, visit icttp2016.com.
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Memrise Prize Aimed at Spurring Innovations in Language Learning
David Shanks and Rosalind Potts, scientists in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London, United Kingdom, have teamed up with the online learning community Memrise to tackle an age-old problem: how to learn a new language — fast. The $10,000 Memrise Prize challenges contestants to “create the most powerful methodology for memorizing new information.” Contestants will devise a 1-hour learning program to teach English speakers previously unfamiliar Lithuanian vocabulary. Those programs that perform well against a control method will pass to the next round of the contest to be reviewed by independent judges, including experts on memory and neuroscience.
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APS Announces Third Replication Project
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS EXTENDED TO 9 JANUARY
Two months after APS published its first Registered Replication Report (RRR), the plan for the third RRR has been finalized and editors are accepting proposals from researchers who would like to participate in the large-scale replication by running the study in their lab. Roy Baumeister and colleagues (1998; Muraven, Tice, & Baumeister, 1998) proposed that performance on tasks requiring self-control is governed by a general, unitary, and finite "internal" resource.
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Focusing on the Past or Future Shapes Spatial Perception of Time
We often think about the future as being in front of us and the past as being at our back – as we walk, places we pass are behind us, and places we have yet to reach lie ahead. But not every culture views time the same way. For instance, although the Arabic dialect spoken in Morocco refers to time in the same way that English does, previous research suggests that Moroccans have a tendency to see the past as being in front of them and the future as being behind them.
