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Is Violence Declining? APS Fellow Steven Pinker Says “Yes”
Violence is as an inherent part of human society. So if you looked at the number of violent deaths from prehistory to the present day, you would expect to see a pretty steady trend, right? Not so, says APS Fellow Steven Pinker. “Violence has been in decline for thousands of years,” he says. “We may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” Pinker, who is a psychological scientist from Harvard University, collected his research on the subject in a new book called The Better Angels of Our Nature. He discussed the book in a recent lecture at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in Washington DC.
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Evil: Is It Us or All Around Us?
Psychological scientist Philip Zimbardo reflected on his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment with Jon Stewart in a past episode of the Daily Show. In 1971, twelve students were randomly assigned to the roles of a prisoner or a guard in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Within 36 hours, the students displayed characteristics of abusive guards and pathological criminals. The experiment was supposed to run for 2 weeks, but it ended after only 6 days. In this clip, Zimbardo also discusses his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil and explains how our environments can affect our actions.
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Lying Becomes Difficult as We Age
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Janice Murray from the University of Otago, New Zealand present her poster research, “Age, Lies, and Faces: Emotion Recognition Mediates Age-Related Differences.” Murray and her colleagues asked younger and older participants to identify facial emotion expressions and determine whether younger and older speakers’ opinion statements were true or false. The scientists discovered that older adults were less convincing liars and had more difficulty detecting others’ lies.
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<em>Better Angels</em>, Believe It or Not
Two World Wars, the Cold War, and the rise of terrorism must make the past century one of the most violent in the history of our species, right? Not according to Harvard psychologist and APS member Steven Pinker, who argues in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, that violence is declining. According to Pinker, we are actually living in the most peaceful era in human history. Watch Pinker’s TED talk on the myth of violence to learn more about why Pinker thinks our “better angels” are winning out. You can learn more about Pinker’s by reading coverage from The New York Times and Time.
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Longitudinal Impacts of 3-D Spatial Training Among Gifted STEM Undergraduates
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch APSSC Award Winner David I. Miller from the University of California, Berkeley present his research on “Longitudinal Impacts of 3-D Spatial Training Among Gifted Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Undergraduates.” David I. Miller University of California, Berkeley Diane F. Halpern Claremont McKenna College According to Miller’s presentation, twelve hours of spatial training improved gifted students’ performance in a physics class by approximately one-third of a letter grade. The improvement was particularly pronounced in male students.
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Spoiling the Ending Doesn’t Spoil the Story
People hate to know the ending before they’ve read the story or watched the movie. At least that’s what they think. A study in the September issue of Psychological Science reveals that contrary to this popular belief, knowing the ending actually enhances readers’ enjoyment of a story.
