With the entire Peanuts comic strip archive available freely online, there’s no reason not to use the genius of Charles Schulz to illustrate some of the psychological concepts we cover in Intro Psych. On September 27, 1961, Charlie Brown wonders how much Linus’s favorite teacher, Miss Othmar, gets paid. Linus cannot believe that Miss Othmar even gets paid. He is beside himself in anger. She teaches out of love for her pupils, Linus believes. Finally, his sister Lucy confirms what Charlie Brown said—Miss Othmar does indeed receive a paycheck. On September 30, 1961, Linus finds a way to come to terms with it. After covering belief perseverance, show your students the Peanuts comic strips for September 27, 28, and 29, 1961. At this point, Schulz has established that Linus holds a certain belief about his teacher that he just does not want to let go, and his sister, Lucy, has burst his bubble. Invite your students to discuss in pairs or small groups how belief perseverance may look for Linus. He has a strong belief that he does not want to give up: Miss Othmar teaches just for the love of her pupils. And, yet, he has been given information that contradicts this belief: Miss Othmar does indeed get paid. If Linus succumbs to belief perseverance—as we know he does—what might Linus do with this information that would allow him to continue to hold onto his belief that Miss Othmar teaches out of love? Once discussion dies down, ask groups to share their solutions. Finally, show how Schulz resolved it in his September 30, 1961 strip. If time allows, take this discussion one step further and ask students to apply some strategies that can help Linus—and ourselves—avoid falling into the belief perseverance trap. One strategy is to consider the opposite (Lord et al., 1984). What would that look like for Linus? “What if Miss Othmar got paid and kept the money?” Another strategy is to take the perspective of someone else (Yaniv & Choshen-Hillel, 2012). What other conclusions might Linus come to if he stepped into someone else’s shoes and thought about how that person would respond to the same information he has. For example, “What would Charlie Brown (or Lucy, or any other Peanuts character) say about Miss Othmar getting paid?” Conclude the activity by letting students know that seeing our own belief perseverance is not easy, but periodically considering the opposite and switching perspective to look as the evidence through someone else’s eyes can help us avoid the trap. References Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., & Preston, E. (1984). Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47(6), 1231–1243. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.47.6.1231 Yaniv, I., & Choshen-Hillel, S. (2012). When guessing what another person would say is better than giving your own opinion: Using perspective-taking to improve advice-taking. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(5), 1022–1028. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.03.016 ... View more

If you are about to cover or have recently covered the availability heuristic in Intro Psych, ask your students this question. Which are you more concerned about: the coronavirus or the flu virus? Alternatively, How concerned are you about the coronavirus? (1 not at all concerned to 7 very concerned) How concerned are you about the flu virus? (1 not at all concerned to 7 very concerned) Here are the statistics. Coronavirus As of Monday, February 3, 2020, CBS News reports that “there were more than 20,000 confirmed cases [of coronavirus infection] in more than two dozen countries, the vast majority of them in China, according to the World Health Organization. There have been at least 425 deaths in China, and one in the Philippines.” Flu virus In contrast, in the United States alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports as of January 25, 2020 that 19 million to 26 million people have contracted the flu resulting in 180,000 to 310,000 hospitalizations and 10,000 to 25,000 deaths. This year isn’t so bad. The CDC estimates that the flu virus killed 61,000 people during the 2017-2018 flu season, again, just in the United States. If your students are using the availability heuristic here, they are much more likely to be concerned about the coronavirus than the flu virus. The coverage of the coronavirus in mass media and social media is, well, substantial. The coverage of the flu virus is almost nil. This is an excellent opportunity to talk with students about how the information we take in can influence how we see the world, a perception that can cause us to put our fears in the wrong place. Ask students to take a few minutes to generate some strategies for increasing their own awareness of when they may be under the influence of the availability heuristic as well as some strategies for countering it. It may be as simple as realizing that we’re feeling frightened and saying, “Wait. Do I have reason to be frightened? Let me do some research into this.” Of course, this does not mean that your students should be freaked out by the flu instead. Encourage your students to do some research on who is most at risk for dying from the flu. For those who aren’t at risk from dying from the flu, getting the flu vaccine can help prevent them from passing the flu on to someone else who is at risk from dying from it. ... View more

“Nature doesn’t kill people with avalanches. People kill people with avalanches”  (Julavits, 2020, p. 26). Heidi Julavits tells us that in avalanche school she learned about six psychological concepts* that can cause back-country winter enthusiasts to make poor decisions—and then she went on to discuss how these very same factors led her, her classmates, and her avalanche instructors to make some poor decisions when they went out to the slopes (Julavits, 2020). Julavits makes it clear that knowing how psychological concepts can have a negative impact on our decisions doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll make different decisions in the moment. This article reminds me—once again—that knowledge is necessary but not sufficient to change behavior. For example, I know what healthy eating and healthy exercise look like, and I know their benefits. That doesn’t mean that I always make the best decisions regarding healthy eating and healthy exercise. Knowledge is good. It’s just not enough. The Intro Psych thinking chapter or social psych chapter are good places to discuss these psychological concepts—and then help students think through ways of countering them so they don’t get sucked in when needing to make decisions that may indeed be life and death decisions. While the context here happens to be avalanches—and the avoidance thereof—these psychological concepts can be applied to almost any context where a decision needs to be made. Ian McCammon, a mechanical engineer, started thinking a lot about avalanches following the death of a friend. While his focus has been on the mechanics of avalanches, after researching 715 such accidents, he wrote about six psychological concepts that people may use out on the slopes that can lead to disaster (McCammon, 2004). These are the psychological concepts Julavits introduced to us in her avalanche school article (Julavits, 2020). McCammon (2004) begins with this premise: As sad as this accident was [the one that led to the death of his friend], the real tragedy is that similar stories unfold in accident after accident, year after year. An experienced party, often with avalanche training, makes a crucial decision to descend, cross, or highmark a slope they believe is safe. And then they trigger an avalanche that buries one or more of them. In hindsight, the danger was often obvious before these accidents happened, and so people struggle to explain how intelligent people with avalanche training could have seen the hazard, looked straight at it, and behaved as if it wasn’t there. (p.1) The Psychological Concepts Familiarity When we are in familiar surroundings, we are more likely to act just as we have acted in the past. That’s fine as long as the conditions are exactly the same. If they have changed, behaving the same way may not be the best course of action. In McCammon’s archival research, he found that people did indeed take more risks when they were in an area familiar to them. Consistency Once we’ve made a decision, it’s easiest to keep making decisions that are consistent with that first decision. Again, this is fine as long as the conditions stay the same. As conditions change, staying consistent with our first decision may lead to trouble. McCammon found that the groups most committed to being out on the slope took the most risks. Acceptance We want to be accepted by others, so we do things that we believe will lead to their acceptance. Straight men may make poor decisions in order to increase their chances of being accepted by women. McCammon found that groups that included both men and women made riskier decisions, and this seemed to be driven primarily by men making poor decisions, not the women. Expert halo An “informal leader” may spontaneously emerge in the group. This person may have experience or skill, may be older, or may just be more assertive. The group may give this person an “expert halo” and assume the person has expertise they don’t actually possess. McCammon found that groups that had someone that could be identified as a leader took greater risks. Social facilitation When people are confident in their abilities, the more people that are present, the more confident people become. McCammon found that groups that had avalanche training took greater risks if their group had met up with another group prior to the avalanche. Those who had not had avalanche training were less affected by the presence of another group.   Scarcity We value more that which is scarce. New, unblemished snow is scarce and, thus, is highly valued. Indeed, McCammon found that skiers heading to untracked snow took greater risks than those headed to previously-skied snow. Other examples If you live where your students ski or snowboard, this avalanche safety example may resonate with your students. In any case, ask your students to consider other situations where a group has to make a decision about whether or not it is safe to proceed. Boating on a body of water with choppy waves? Rafting on a river with unusually high water? Driving in an area where there is a tornado watch or warning? Weighing whether to stay or move inland with an approaching hurricane. Whatever situation is most likely for your student population, ask your students to identify how each of the factors discussed above may lead to a decision that may result in disaster. Overcoming these factors Now the hard part. Ask students what they could do to recognize these factors at play in the moment and, just importantly, how they could counteract them. As a take-home assignment, ask students to investigate strategies that help keep people from falling into these traps. During the next class session, ask students to share what they learned. Conclusion A lot of what we cover in the Intro Psych course has the potential to change a student’s life. This topic has the potential to save a student’s life.   References Julavits, H. (2020, January). Calamity lesson. New York Times Magazine, 24–31, 48. McCammon, I. (2004). Heuristic traps in recreational avalanche accidents: Evidence and implications. Avalanche Review, 22(68). Retrieved from www.snowpit.com.   *Julavits and McCammon refer to these concepts as heuristics. In Intro Psych, some of these are considered simply principles or concepts, so I’ve replaced the term heuristics with “psychological concepts.”   ... View more

When Seattle residents were surveyed concerning their fear of crime, many reported a fear that outpaced the actual level of crime. Two neighborhoods, for example, “are seemingly safe places to live, and rank among the 15 neighborhoods with the lowest rates of reported crime. But in terms of fear, they rank second and third, respectively — both at least 10 points higher than the city average.” There are 8 additional neighborhoods whose amount of crime is below the city average but whose fear of crime is above the city average (Balk, 2018). Additionally, while Seattle crime is frequently reported in the news, suburban crime is less reported. Some residents of Bellevue (population 150,000 and located 10 miles east of Seattle) have complained that problems with crime in their city has not enjoyed the same media coverage Seattle’s has. In all fairness, Bellevue’s crime rate is not near that of Seattle’s. For example, in 2018, while Seattle had 992 burglaries per 100,000 residents, Bellevue had 268 per 100,000 residents (Balk, 2019). Why do the residents of some Seattle neighbors greatly fear crime while their neighborhoods are pretty safe? Why do the residents of Bellevue think there is more crime in their city than there is? One culprit may be Nextdoor.com (Balk, 2019), “The private social network for your neighborhood.” The Nextdoor.com website says, “Nextdoor is the best way to stay informed about what’s going on in your neighborhood—whether it’s finding a last-minute babysitter, planning a local event, or sharing safety tips. There are so many ways our neighbors can help us, we just need an easier way to connect with them.” As a member of Nextdoor.com, I do see all of those things. But Nextdoor also provides a way for everyone to report suspicious activity and actual crime (posting security cam recordings of thieves stealing packages is a favorite), whether experienced themselves or by a neighbor. “Suspicious activity” is, of course, subjective. Whether it’s actual crime or “suspicious activity” that may have been nothing, it’s easy for readers of Nextdoor to add ticks to their mental crime column. For frequent Nextdoor readers, crime information is salient. The availability heuristic leads such readers to think their neighborhoods are crime-ridden when, in fact, the crime rates may be quite low. If only people would also report when they experienced no crime. (Do you think I could start that trend? “Dear neighbors, nobody harmed my family or stole my property today.”) It’s another nice reminder that the information we take in does indeed influence our perceptions. For those keeping score – System 1: 1; System 2: 0 (Stanovich & West, 2000). References Balk, G. (2018, June 28). ‘Mean world syndrome’: In some Seattle neighborhoods, fear of crime exceeds reality. Seattle Times. Retrieved from https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/mean-world-syndrome-in-some-seattle-neighborhoods-fear-of-crime-exceeds-reality Balk, G. (2019, February 11). The ‘Nextdoor effect’ in Bellevue: A familiar reaction to crime. Seattle Times. Retrieved from https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/the-nextdoor-effect-in-bellevue-a-familiar-reaction-to-crime Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 645–726. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00003435 ... View more

Cartoonists have pretty good insight into the workings of the human mind. How many of them took Intro Psych? These comics will jazz up your next research methods, cognition, personality, learning, and social psych lectures. Dilbert's boss does not have an operational definition of "employee engagement," and, thus, no way to measure it. Also, on the ethics side, no, it's not okay to make up data. Lio, having no trouble with functional fixedness, repurposes an object into a sled. Lio’s friends aren’t typical. His ingroups include monsters, aliens, and death himself. When everyone else sees those creatures as part of a threatening outgroup, to Lio, they are just his friends. Also, you don’t have to read through too many strips to see Lio’s strong internal locus of control. Rat in Pearls Before Swine can be counted on for a solid outgroup homogeneity bias. Jeremy’s mom in Zits provides a nice example of positive punishment. No, I don’t think he’ll forget his textbook at home again. Or, perhaps more likely, if he does forget it at home, he won’t ask his mom to bring it to school. After all, punishment makes us better at avoiding the punishment. Caulfield, the boy in Frazz, wonders if Santa has fallen victim to the just-world phenomenon. Pig in Pearls Before Swine, whose sweetness and innocence may be unparalleled in the comics universe, does not fall for the fundamental attribution error. Looking for more example from the comics? Here are some previous comic-focused blog posts: Spotlight effect Door-in-the-Face, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning Change blindness, priming, and positive reinforcement ... View more

Crows are smart. Never underestimate a crow. Comparative psychology is “the study of nonhuman animal behavior with the dual objective of understanding the behavior for its own sake and furthering the understanding of human behavior” (American Psychological Association, n.d.). The better that we understand how crows behave, think, communicate, and solve problems, the better we will understand both crows and ourselves. I have a short written assignment that my Intro Psych students do. After its completion, students have a greater appreciation for the crows around them. John Marzluff, a University of Washington zoologist, has made studying crows his life’s work. In his 22-minute TEDx talk, Marzluff shares what he thinks everyone should know about crows. I assign this during the thinking chapter in Intro Psych, after we’ve covered neuroscience and learning. It makes for a nice review of previously covered content. Here are the questions I ask my students to address: What three factors does Marzluff cite for the crow's problem-solving ability? Explain how each contributes to problem-solving skills. How do the brain areas of crows map onto the human brain? What do those brain areas do and why are they important? How do their brains differ from those of humans? Give an example from his talk of how the birds' behavior changed due to positive reinforcement. Give an example from his talk of how the birds' behavior changed due to observational learning. What is your reaction to this video?      Video Link : 2348   Reference American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Comparative psychology. Retrieved December 26, 2018, from https://dictionary.apa.org/comparative-psychology ... View more

Imagine that you’re about to buy a $5000 used car. To pay for it, you’ll need to sell some of your stocks. Which of the following would you rather sell? $5000 of Stock X shares, which you originally purchased for $2500. $5000 of Stock Y shares, which you originally purchased for $10,000.   If you’d rather sell Stock X and reap your $2500 profit now, you’re not alone. One analysis of 10,000 investor accounts revealed that most people strongly prefer to lock in a profit rather than absorb a loss. Investors’ loss aversion is curious: What matters is each stock’s future value, not whether it has made or lost money in the past. (If anything, tax considerations favor selling the loser for a tax loss and avoiding the capital gains tax on the winner.)   Loss aversion is ubiquitous, and not just in big financial decisions. Participants in experiments, where rewards are small, will choose a sure gain over flipping a coin for double or nothing—but they will readily flip a coin on a double-or-nothing chance to avert a loss. As Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky reported, we feel the pain from a loss twice as keenly as we feel the pleasure from a similar-sized gain. Losing $20 feels worse than finding $20 feels good. No surprise, then, that we so vigorously avoid losing in so many situations.   The phenomenon extends to the endowment effect—our attachment to what we own and our aversion to losing it, as when those given a coffee mug demand more money to sell it than those not given the mug are willing to pay for it. Small wonder our homes are cluttered with things we wouldn’t today buy, yet won’t part with.   Loss aversion is but one example of a larger bad-is-stronger-than-good phenomenon, note Roy Baumeister and his colleagues. Bad events evoke more misery than good events evoke joy. Cruel words hurt us more than compliments please us. A bad reputation is easier to acquire—with a single lie or heartless act—than is a good reputation. “In everyday life, bad events have stronger and more lasting consequences than comparable good events.” Psychologically, loss is larger than gain. Emotionally, bad is stronger than good.               Coaches and players are aware of the pain of losses, so it’s no surprise that loss aversion plays out in sports. Consider this example from basketball: Say your team is behind by 2 points, with time only for one last shot. Would you prefer a 2-point or a 3-point attempt?   Most coaches, wanting to avoid a loss, will seek to put the game into overtime with a 2-point shot. After all, an average 3-point shot will produce a win only one-third of the time. But if the team averages 50 percent of its 2-point attempts, and has about a 50 percent chance of overtime in this toss-up game, the loss-aversion strategy will yield but a 25 percent chance of both (a) sending the game to overtime, followed by (b) an overtime victory. Thus, by averting an immediate loss, these coaches reduce the chance of an ultimate win—rather like investors who place their money in loss-avoiding bonds and thus forego the likelihood, over extended time, of a much greater stock index win.   And now comes news (kindly shared by a mathematician friend) of loss aversion in baseball and softball base-running. Statistician Peter MacDonald, mathematician Dan McQuillan, and computer scientist Ian McQuillan invite us to imagine “a tie game in the bottom of the ninth inning, and there is one out—a single run will win the game. You are on first base, hoping the next batter gets a hit.”   As the batter hits a fly to shallow right, you hesitate between first and second to see if the sprinting outfielder will make the catch. When the outfielder traps rather than catches the ball, you zoom to second. The next batter hits a fly to center field and, alas, the last batter strikes out.   You probably didn’t question this cautious base-running scenario, because it’s what players do and what coaches commend. But consider an alternative strategy, say MacDonald and his colleagues. If you had risked running to third on that first fly ball, you would have scored the winning run on the ensuing fly ball. Using data from 32 years of Major League Baseball, the researchers calculate that any time the fly ball is at least 38 percent likely to fall for a hit, the runner should abandon caution and streak for third. Yet, when in doubt, that rational aggressive running strategy “is never attempted.”   You may object that players cannot compute probabilities. But, says the MacDonald team, “players and their third-base coaches make these sorts of calculations all the time. They gamble on sacrifice flies and stolen base attempts using probabilities of success.” Nevertheless, when it comes to running from first, their first goal is to avert loss—and to avoid, even at the cost of a possible run, the risk of looking like a fool. We implicitly think “What if I fail?” before “How can I succeed?”   Often in life, it seems, our excessive fear of losing subverts our opportunities to win. Caution thwarts triumph. Little ventured, little gained.   My late friend Gerry Haworth understood the risk-reward relationship. A shop teacher at our local high school, he began making wood products in his garage shop. Then, in 1948, he ventured the business equivalent of running to third base—quitting his job and launching a business, supported by his dad’s life savings. Today, family-owned Haworth Inc., America’s third-largest furniture manufacturer, has more than 6000 employees and nearly $2 billion in annual sales. Something ventured, something gained. ... View more

“The heart has its reasons which reason does not know." ~Pascal, Pensees, 1670   “He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool.” ~Proverbs 28:26 “Buried deep within each and every one of us, there is an instinctive, heart-felt awareness” that can guide our behavior. So proclaimed Prince Charles in a 2000 lecture. Trust your gut instincts.   Prince Charles has much company. “I’m a gut player. I rely on my instincts,” explained President George W. Bush in justifying his decision to launch the Iraq war, after earlier talking with Vladimir Putin and declaring himself “able to get a sense of his soul.”   “Within the first minute [of meeting Kim Jong-un] I’ll know, declared President Trump. “My touch, my feel—that’s what I do.” Afterwards he added, “We had a great chemistry—you understand how I feel about chemistry.” The heart has its reasons.   But is there also wisdom to physicist Richard Feynman’s channeling the skepticism of King Solomon’s Proverb: “The first principle,” said Feynman, “is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”   In sifting intuition’s powers and perils, psychological science has some wisdom.   First, our out-of-sight, automatic, intuitive information processing is HUGE. In Psychology, 12 th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I offer some examples: Automatic processing: We glide through life mostly on autopilot. Our information processing is mostly implicit, unconscious, behind the scenes—and often guided by “fast and frugal” heuristics (mental shortcuts). Intuitive expertise: After mastering driving (or chess), people can react to situations intuitively, without rational analysis. Reading others: We are skilled at reading “thin slices” of behavior—as when judging someone’s warmth from a 6-second video clip. Blindsight: Some blind people even display “blindsight”—they can intuitively place an envelope in a mail slot they cannot consciously see.   Second, our intuition is perilous. Psychology is flush with examples of smart people’s predictable and sometimes tragic intuitive errors: Human lie detection: People barely surpass chance when intuiting whether others are lying or truth-telling. (American presidents might want to remember this when judging Putin’s or Kim Jong-un’s trustworthiness.) Intuitive prejudice: As demonstrated in some police responses to ambiguous situations, implicit biases can—without any conscious malevolent intent—affect our perceptions and reactions. (Is that man pulling out a gun or a phone?) Intuitive fears: We fear things that kill people vividly and memorably (because we intuitively judge risks by how readily images of a threat come to mind). Thus we may—mistakenly—fear flying more than driving, shark attacks more than drowning, school mass shootings more than street and home shootings. The “interview illusion”: Given our ability to read warmth from thin slices, it’s understandable that employment interviewers routinely overestimate their ability to predict future job success from unstructured get-acquainted interviews. But aptitude tests, work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance are all better predictors. (Even the lengthiest of interviews—the mate-selection process—is a fragile predictor of long-term marital success.)   The bottom line: Intuition—automatic, implicit, unreasoned thoughts and feelings—grows from our experience, feeds our creativity, and guides our lives. Intuition is powerful. But it also is perilous, especially when we overfeel and underthink. Unchecked, uncritical intuition sometimes leads us into ill-fated relationships, feeds overconfident predictions, and even leads us into war. ... View more

Would you risk riding to the airport in a self-driving car? If you said no, you aren’t alone. In a 2017 Pew survey, 56 percent of Americans said they would not risk it. That proportion likely has increased in the aftermath of the self-driving Uber car killing a pedestrian on March 19, 2018. Meanwhile, so far this year, around 1200 other pedestrians have been killed by people-driven cars, and few of us have decided not to risk driving (or walking).   Time will tell whether, as experts assure us, self-driving cars, without distracted or inebriated drivers, really will be much safer. Even if it’s so, it will be a hard fact to embrace. Why? Because we fear disasters that are vividly “available” in our minds and memories—shark attacks, school shootings, plane crashes—often in settings where we feel little control. “Dramatic outcomes make us gasp,” Nathan DeWall and I conclude in Psychology, 12 th Edition, while “probabilities we hardly grasp.”     We do a better job of grasping probabilities in realms where we have lots of experience. If a weather forecaster predicts a mere 30 percent chance of rain for tomorrow, we won’t be shocked if it does indeed rain—as it should about one-third of the time, given such a forecast. We have much less experience with presidential election predictions. Thus many people thought the pollsters and prognosticators had egg on their faces after Donald Trump’s upset win. Statistician and author Nate Silver’s final election forecast gave Trump but a 29 percent chance of victory. Although a 30 percent chance of rain and a 30 percent victory chance are the same odds, an ensuing rain comes as less of a shock.   With March Madness basketball games, as with weather forecasts, we fans have more experience. Tweets Silver: Lesson learned? In domains where we have minimal direct experience, we often don’t get it because the cognitive availability of vivid, rare events may hijack our thinking: “Probabilities we hardly grasp.” But in realms where we do experience life’s uncertainties—as in daily weather variations and sports outcomes—we get it. We appreciate that probabilities calibrate uncertainties. Given enough happenings, anything, however improbable, is sure to occur. ... View more

[A growing body of research suggests that true humility helps us grow intellectually and to learn from and connect with each other.] In his recent essay, “You’re Wrong! I’m Right!,” Nicholas Kristof notes that our polarized culture would benefit from a willingness to engage those who challenge our own thinking and “to hear out the other side.” In a word, our civic life needs a greater spirit of humility. In his recent European Psychologist review of evidence on wise thinking, Igor Grossmann concurs with Kristof: Wisdom, he argues, grows from the integration of “intellectual humility, recognition of uncertainty [and] consideration of different perspectives.” Humility was the animating idea of John Templeton in founding his science-supportive foundation, which declares: “In keeping with the Foundation’s motto, ‘How little we know, how eager to learn,’ we value proposals that exhibit intellectual humility and open-mindedness.” Thanks partly to support from the Templeton Foundation (which—full disclosure—I serve as a trustee), we have a new generation of humility studies with titles such as “Awe and Humility,” “Humility as a Relational Virtue,” and “Intellectual Humility.” From 2000 to 2017, the annual number of PsycINFO-indexed titles mentioning “humility” has increased from one to 85: Psychology has a deep history in studying the powers and perils of humility’s antithesis: pride. We have, for example, documented: self-serving bias. We tend to see ourselves (on subjective, socially desirable dimensions) as better than most others—as more ethical, less prejudiced, and better able to get along with people. self-enhancing attributions. We willingly accept responsibility for our successes and good deeds, while shifting the blame elsewhere for our failures and misdeeds. cognitive conceit. We tend to display excessive confidence in the accuracy of our judgments and beliefs. Humility, by contrast, entails an accurate self-understanding. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, humility is not clever people believing they are fools. Humility allows us to recognize both our own talents and others’. modest self-presentation. When we share and accept credit without seeking attention, we are not (to again paraphrase Lewis) thinking less of ourselves but thinking of ourselves less. an orientation toward others. Prioritizing others’ needs helps us regulate our own impulses. With a spirit of humility we can engage others with the anticipation that, on some matters, the other is our superior—thus giving us an opportunity to learn. True humility can be distinguished from pseudo-humility, which comes to us in two forms. One is the pretense of humility: “I am humbled to accept this award . . . to serve as your president . . . to have scored the winning goal.” No, actually, you are proud of your accomplishment—and deservedly so. The other is the delightful new research by Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino, and Michael Norton on “the humblebrag.” Humblebragging is boasting disguised as complaining or humility: “I’ve got to stop saying yes to every interview request.” “I can’t believe I was the one who got the job over 300 other applicants!” “No makeup and I still get hit on!” But such self-promotion usually backfires, they report, by failing to convey humility or impress others. Although religious dogmatism can feed “You’re wrong, I’m right!” attitudes, theism actually offers a deep rationale for the humility that underlies science, critical thinking, and an “ever-reforming” open mind. Across their differences, most faith traditions assume two things: 1) there is a God, and 2) it’s not you or me. As fallible creatures, we should hold our own beliefs tentatively. And we should assess others’ ideas with openness, using observation and experiments (where appropriate) to winnow truth from error—both in our own thinking and that of others. In a spirit of humility, we can “Test everything, hold fast to what is good” (St. Paul). ... View more

Just two days after the Parkland, Florida high school shooting, a colleague appeared at my office door on the Highline College campus and said, “I just heard 6 to 8 shots and people screaming.” We waved people into our small office building, and then secured the doors. And waited. Campus Security sent out periodic computer pop-ups, texts, and emails with updates – 8 in all, from the first alert to the all-clear. The communication was welcome. A colleague locked in a classroom with her students had a live feed from a local news station playing on the classroom computer. After dozens of police officers spent two and a half hours going over the college’s 80 acres with a fine-tooth comb – no fewer than 8 rifle-bearing officers looked through the shrubbery in front of our building – no victim(s) and no shooter were found. One campus rumor says that it was lunar new year firecrackers, but I haven’t seen anything that looks like an official report yet. Less than an hour after my colleague came to my door, I got a text from a friend in Harrisonburg, VA asking if I was okay. Harrisonburg is 2,804 miles away; Google Maps says I can drive there in “41 hours without traffic.” I did a news search about halfway into our lockdown and found a report by a UK news outlet. While I understand that we no longer rely on the Pony Express to deliver news, I was still surprised at the speed the news traveled. Especially when there were no known victims. Just the promise of tragedy was enough to send the news around the world. What happens when you barricade a bunch of social science faculty in a small space? You get an impromptu interdisciplinary panel discussion on gun violence courtesy of a political scientist, sociologist, and psychologist. I imagine this would make for a popular course. In my Intro Psych class for this coming week, the topics happen to include the availability heuristic and priming. The availability heuristic tells us that hearing about every mass shooting (or non-shooting as it was on my campus) affects our estimates of violence. Our own non-shooting prompted more than one student or family member of a student to report to journalists that they are considering enrolling only in online classes. Being primed with the Parkland shooting likely influenced the perception of the pops heard on my campus as gunshots and the beginnings of a mass shooting. (The pops may have very well been gunshots and not firecrackers, although the police reported finding no shell casings.) Even though, in the end, it appears that the students and employees of Highline College were never in any danger, that doesn’t erase the terror that so many felt at the time. One student emailed her professor the next day to say that she hasn’t been able to concentrate on studying because of the trauma of running for her life. About 24-hours later, I received a text from a colleague suggesting what we should do differently if we were to experience this again; she’s still processing it. Normal responses. “Resources for dealing with a school shooting” The Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (SCCAP; Division 53 of the American Psychological Association) has created a wiki page of resources. They’re working on putting together a Wikipedia page, but in the meantime you can find their resources for professionals, caregivers, educators, and the public on this Wikiversity page. Several of the resources are curated from The National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN). Here’s a direct link to the NCTSN “School Shooting Response” page. The SCCAP Wikiversity page is a work in progress; check it periodically for updates. ... View more

Credit President Trump with consistency in cultivating public fears of immigrants: “When Mexico sends its people . . . they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” ( 2015 ) A January, 2018 DonaldJTrump.com ad offered images of an illegal-immigrant murderer while a narrator referred to “evil, illegal immigrants who commit violent crimes,” noting that “Democrats who stand in our way will be complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants.” “If we don’t get rid of these loopholes where killers are allowed to come into our country and continue to kill … if we don’t change it, let’s have a shutdown,” Trump said two weeks later.   Horrific rare incidents feed the narrative, as in Trump’s oft retold story of the Mexican national who killed a young woman in San Francisco (with a ricocheted bullet), or in his February 6th tweet about the unauthorized immigrant drunk driver who killed a Baltimore Colts linebacker.   The effect of this rhetoric and these publicized incidents appears in a recent Gallup survey: “On the issue of crime, Americans are five times more likely to say immigrants make the situation worse rather than better (45% to 9%, respectively).” Are they (and the President) right?   With 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., there will, of course, be ample opportunities to illustrate both immigrant horrors and heroism. Mindful that emotionally compelling stories can illustrate larger truths or deceive us, I searched for data that would answer this question: Are the President’s words illustrating a painful fact that justifies anti-immigrant views, or are they fear mongering demagoguery? Here’s what I found (drawn from my contribution to an upcoming social psychology symposium on human gullibility): Immigrants who are poor and less educated may fit our image of criminals. Yet studies find that, compared with native-born Americans, immigrants commit less violent crime ( Butcher & Piehl, 2007 ; Riley, 2015 ). “Immigrants are less likely than the native-born to commit crimes,” confirms a National Academy of Sciences report ( 2015 ). After analyzing incarceration rates, the conservative Cato Institute ( 2017 ) confirmed that “immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than natives relative to their shares of the population. Even illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans.” Noncitizens are reportedly 7 percent of the U.S. population and 6 percent of state and federal prisoners ( KFF, 2018 ; Rizzo, 2018 ). Moreover, as the number of unauthorized immigrants has tripled since 1990 ( Krogstad et al., 2017 ), the U.S. crime rate plummeted .   Alas, when pitted against memorable anecdotes, data—which are merely the sum of all anecdotes—often lose. The availability heuristic—the human tendency to estimate the commonality of an event based on its mental availability (often influenced by its vividness) frequently hijacks human judgments. When data on immigrant arrest or prison population proportions are set against this 2.5 minute excerpt from the 2018 State of the Union address—highlighting the teary parents of two daughters reportedly murdered by a gang with illegal immigrant members—which will people more likely remember?   Moreover, social psychologists Leaf Van Boven and Paul Slovic recently noted that the White House has also promoted its immigrants-as-killers thesis with misleading statistics. “Nearly 3 in 4 individuals convicted of terrorism-related charges are foreign-born,” the President tweeted last month. But that statement, and the administration report on which it was based, were “deeply misleading” the psychologists explain, for two reasons. First, the report excluded domestic terrorists, whom Americans fear most, and was inflated with tenuously relevant terrorism-related activities such as perjury and petty theft. Second, the scary-sounding statistic exploited people’s statistical illiteracy. Consider, they say, that 3 in 4 NBA players are African-American. Even so, “a vanishingly small” percentage of African-American men—less than 0.01 percent—play in the NBA. Thus, knowing only that a man is African-American, the chances are 99.99+ percent that he is not an NBA player. And knowing only that someone has been born outside the U.S., you can be similarly confident that the person is not a terrorist, or a killer. Donald Trump’s fear mongering and repeated misrepresentation of truth has me thinking again of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—a world where repeated falsehoods come to be believed: “Freedom is slavery.” “Ignorance is strength.” “War is peace.” I do wonder: When Trump proclaims these falsehoods, does he know they are untrue, or does he believe what he proclaims?   Pope Francis offered a possible answer, quoting Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “People who lie to themselves and listen to their own lie come to such a pass that they cannot distinguish the truth within them, or around them, and so lose all respect for themselves and for others.”   ... View more

Category labels matter. On the color spectrum, blue transitions gradually into green. But at some point we place a dividing line between the blue wavelengths (to the left) and the greens (to the right). Once we do so, equally different wavelengths are harder to distinguish when they share the same label, such as blue, than when on opposite sides of the blue-green naming line.   Similarly, two locations seem closer and more at risk for the same natural disaster if labeled as in the same state, rather than being equally distant across state lines. As Nathan DeWall and I write in Psychology, 12 th Edition, “Tornadoes don’t know about state lines, but people do.”   This curious effect of labels on our thinking came to mind when reading about a new study showing that young children think that birthday parties cause aging. We adults don’t have this magical thinking. Moreover, we rationally know that on our birthdays we are only one day older than the day before . . . exactly as the previous day we were but one day older than the day before that.   Yet category labels matter. So, do our birthdays make us feel just a tad older?   Mine does. You too? ... View more

One of psychology’s most reliable phenomena is “the overconfidence phenomenon”—the tendency, when making judgments and forecasts, to be more confident than correct. Stockbrokers market their advice regarding which stocks will likely rise while other stock brokers give opposite advice (with a stock’s current price being the balance point between them). But in the long run, as economist Burton Malkiel has repeatedly demonstrated, essentially none of them beat the efficient marketplace.   Or consider psychologist Philip Tetlock’s collection of more than 27,000 expert predictions of world events, such as the future of South Africa or whether Quebec would separate from Canada. As Nathan DeWall and I explain in Psychology, 12 th Edition, His repeated finding: These predictions, which experts made with 80 percent confidence on average, were right less than 40 percent of the time. Nevertheless, even those who erred maintained their confidence by noting they were “almost right.” “The Québécois separatists almost won the secessionist referendum.”   My fellow Worth Publishers text author and Nobel laureate economist, Paul Krugman, has described similar overconfidence and reluctance to admit error among economists and politicians. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich, conservative politicians and economists predicted economic disaster—but the economy instead boomed, with 23 million jobs added during the Clinton years. When Kansas politicians passed large tax cuts with the promise that growth would pay for them, the result was an unexpected state funding crisis. When, in 2008, the Federal Reserve responded to the recession by cutting interest rates to zero, conservative economists and pundits published an open letter warning of soaring inflation to come. But it hasn’t.   When none of the predicted economic outcomes happened, did the forecasters own their error and change their thinking? Contacted by Bloomberg, not one of the inflation open letter signatories acknowledged error. Instead, they offered (in Krugman’s words) “some reason wrong was right … and never, ever, an admission that maybe something was wrong with [their] initial analysis.” Overconfidence—the human bias that our own Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, would most like to eliminate—feeds another potent phenomenon, “belief perseverance”—our tendency to cling to our beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. The more we explain why our beliefs might be true, the more they persist. Thus we welcome belief-supportive evidence—about climate change, same-sex marriage, or the effects of today’s proposed tax cuts—while discounting contrary evidence. To believe is to see.   Perhaps, then, we should all aspire to a greater spirit of humility. Such recognizes, as I have written elsewhere, that We are finite and fallible. We have dignity but not deity. [Thus] we should hold our own untested beliefs tentatively, assess others ’ ideas with open-minded skepticism, and when appropriate, use observation and experimentation to winnow error from truth. ... View more

As if cell phone use in cars isn’t bad enough, car manufacturers are building distractions into our automobiles, which I affectionately call Built-in Automotive Driving Distraction Systems TM . Automakers now include more options to allow drivers to use social media, email and text. The technology is also becoming more complicated to use. Cars used to have a few buttons and knobs. Some vehicles now have as many as 50 buttons on the steering wheel and dashboard that are multi-functional. There are touch screens, voice commands, writing pads, heads-up displays on windshields and mirrors and 3-D computer-generated images (Lowy, 2017). In an attempt to save lives, I have been hammering pretty hard on our inability to multi-task in my Intro Psych course. While this topic comes up in greater detail when I cover consciousness, I also embed examples of attention research in my coverage of research methods. Correlation example After I introduce the concept of correlations, I give my students 5 correlations, and ask them to identify the correlation as positive, negative, or no correlation. One of those correlations comes from a 2009 Stanford study reported by NBC News: people who multitask the most are the worst at it (“memory, ability to switch from one task to another, and being able to focus on a task”) (“Multitaskers, pay attention -- if you can,” 2009). Experiment example In talking about experimental design, I discuss David Strayer’s driving simulation research at the University of Utah. His lab’s research is easy for students to understand and the results carry a punch. I give this description to my students and ask them to identify the independent variable and the dependent variables. In an experiment, "[p]articipants drove in a simulator while either talking or not talking on a hands-free cell phone." Those who were talking on a cell phone made more driving errors, such as swerving off the road or into the wrong lane, running a stoplight or stop sign, not stopping for a pedestrian in a crosswalk, than those who were not talking on a cell phone. Even more interestingly, those who were talking on a cellphone rated their driving in the simulator as safer as compared to those who weren't talking on a cellphone. In other words, those talking on the cellphone were less likely to be aware of the driving errors they were making (Sanbonmatsu, Strayer, Biondi, Behrends, & Moore, 2016).   Class demo When Yana Weinstein of LearningScientists.org posted a link to a blog she wrote on a task switching demo (Weinstein, 2017) to the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Facebook page, I thought, “Now this is what my research methods lecture was missing!” I encourage you to read Weinstein’s original demo once you’re done reading mine.   I randomly divided my class into two groups. To do that I used a random team generator for Excel, but use whatever system you’d like. Weinstein does this demo with a within subjects design which, frankly, makes more sense than my between subjects design, but in my defense I’m also using this demo to help students understand the value of random assignment.   One group of students recited numbers and letters sequentially (1 to 10 and then A to J). The other group recited them interleaved (1 A 2 B 3 C, etc.). In your instructions, be clear that students cannot write down the numbers/letters and just read them. That’s a different task! Students worked in small groups. While one student recited, another student timed them with a cellphone stopwatch app. (You don’t have to know anything about cellphone stopwatch apps. Your students can handle it.) I didn’t bother dividing students into groups by task. In one group, there might have been three students who recited sequentially and a fourth student who recited interleaved. I asked students to write down their times, and then I came around to each group and asked for those times. I just wrote the times on a piece of paper, and displayed the results using a doc camera. Almost everyone in the sequential condition recited the numbers/letters in under 6 seconds. Almost everyone in the interleaved condition took over 13 seconds. In addition to talking about the independent variable (and experimental and control conditions) and the dependent variable, we talked about the value of random assignment. I had no idea who could do these tasks quickly or slowly. If 20% of them could do these tasks quickly, then random assignment would likely create two groups where the percentage of fast-task participants would be the same in each group. Is it possible that all of the fast-task participants ended up in the sequential task condition? Yep. And that’s one reason replication is important. Oh. And when you’re studying or writing a paper, students, this is why you should keep your phone on silent and out of sight. If you keep looking at your phone for social media or text notifications, it’s going to take you a lot longer to finish your studying or finish writing your paper. Perhaps even twice as long. And driving? As you switch back and forth from driving to phone (or from driving to Built-in Automotive Driving Distraction Systems TM ), it’s not going to take you twice as long to get to your destination. You’re traveling at the same speed, but you’re working with half the attention. That increases the chances that you will not get to your destination at all.   A lot of what we cover in Intro Psych is important to the quality of students’ lives. Helping students see our inability to multitask is important in helping our students – and the people they are near them when they drive – stay alive.   References Lowy, J. (2017, October 5). Technology crammed into cars worsens driver distraction. The Seattle Times. Seattle. Retrieved from https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/new-cars-increasingly-crammed-with-distracting-technology-2  Multitaskers, pay attention -- if you can. (2009). Retrieved from http://www.nbcnews.com/id/32541721/ns/health-mental_health Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Strayer, D. L., Biondi, F., Behrends, A. A., & Moore, S. M. (2016). Cell-phone use diminishes self-awareness of impaired driving. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23 (2), 617–623. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-015-0922-4 Weinstein, Y. (2017). The cost of task switching: A simple yet very powerful demonstration. Retrieved from http://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2017/7/28-1  ... View more

Macmillan Learning is proud to announce that Psychology 4e and Introducing Psychology 3e author Daniel L. Schacter (Harvard University) will be receiving the William James Fellow Award at the Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention in Boston. The William James Fellow award recognizes individuals who have used their professional careers to make profound contributions to the science of psychology. The groundbreaking work Schacter has done over the past 35 years on the triumphs and failures of memory has exhibited the very nature of memory. Schacter has aptly titled his award “Adaptive Constructive Processes in Memory and Imagination,” as he has explored how memory works as a cognitive “virtual reality simulator” by taking past events as a way of imaging the future. Attending APS in Boston this May? Join us on Friday May 26 at 4:15pm at the Worth Publishers/Macmillan Learning booth, #410 to congratulate Schacter on his achievements. Coffee and refreshments will be served. ... View more

I never used to cover sleep, but once it became clear that so many students weren’t getting enough sleep, I started talking about it – at length. I had the same experience with stress. The stress and coping chapter was one I typically skipped in Intro, until I opened my eyes to the stress my students were feeling combined with the lack of good coping skills. And now I’m back in that very same boat but this time it’s the number of drug overdoses. Invite your students to visit The New York Times article “You Draw It: Just How Bad Is the Drug Overdose Epidemic [in the United States]?”[Shout out to Ruth Frickle for sending me this article!] and complete each of the graphs to illustrate their best guesses on how, in the US, the number of deaths due to car accidents, deaths from guns, deaths from HIV, and deaths from drug overdoses has changed since 1990. After students draw on each graph, ask them to click the “Show me how I did” button. Next, ask students to calculate how far off they were. For each graph, write down your guess. If you underestimated, subtract your guess from the actual number, write down how much you were off, and note that you underestimated. If you overestimated, subtract the actual number of deaths from your guess, write down how much you were off, and note that you overestimated. After pressing each “Show me how I did” button, text appears explaining the hypothesized causes for the change in the number of deaths. Ask students to read the text following the drug abuse graph, and identify the possible reasons for the steep climb in overdose deaths and identify the ways that have been suggested to reduce the number of deaths. In class, by a show of hands (or using a clicker system), ask students if they were the farthest off on death by car accident? Death from guns? Death by HIV? Or death by drug overdose? (If you’ve covered the availability heuristic, now is a nice time to revisit that concept? “What type of deaths do you hear the most about? Did those deaths receive your highest guesses?” Or if you’re not ready to tackle drug abuse as a topic, use this as an availability heuristic example to help students be more aware of the issue.) If time allows, invite students to discuss in pairs or small groups how researchers could investigate the effectiveness of each drug overdose prevention proposal. If you’d like to use this as a research methods booster, give each group one of the five prevention proposals given near the end of the article. Ask each group to write the proposal as an hypothesis, e.g., If there were “tighter regulation of prescription opioids,” then the number of drug overdose deaths would decrease (or the rate of increase in drug overdose deaths would be slowed). Each group should then identify the independent variable (including experimental and control conditions) and the dependent variable, including operational definitions, and identify any ethical concerns in doing this research. In whatever context you choose to discuss this topic be aware that some of your students may have experience with drug overdoses. They, themselves, may have had an overdose, or they may have a friend or family who overdosed and who may have died as a result. ... View more

The cover story for the (freely available) December 2016 APA Monitor is on racial bias and police work. The author of the article provides a nice summary of the research to date and how police departments are moving forward to reduce inequalities in their work. In preparation for class discussion (small groups in class or online discussion boards) or as a stand-alone assignment, ask students to read the article and respond to the following questions: Before we can address a problem, we need to know that a problem exists. What evidence is there that police officers show bias against blacks? Explain the difference between explicit prejudice and implicit bias. What is the “the police officer’s dilemma,” and how is it used to test for implicit bias? How do police officers do on this test as compared to civilians? Many police departments have brought in experts to run implicit bias workshops. Are these workshops effective at reducing implicit bias? What alternatives have been proposed for reducing the effects of implicit bias rather than implicit bias itself? Bonus question: What is your local police department doing to reduce the inequalities in how officers treat different members of your community? What can you do, as a citizen of your community, to encourage your police department to make changes that will move police work to be good for everyone in your community? ... View more

Sure, you can explain what a prototype is, but what if students could experience generating a prototype and seeing how it compares with others? Maria Vita (Penn Manor High School, Millersville, PA) suggests using Google’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) experiment “Quick, Draw!” to do just that. After explaining prototypes, send students to the Google “Quick, Draw!” website on any web-enabled device, although a device with a touchscreen, such as a smartphone, is better. Students click the “Let’s Draw!” button to start. Students will be given 20 seconds to draw an object or a concept, such as boomerang. Google uses machine learning to try to guess what the object is. Once Google has correctly guessed or 20 seconds is up, whichever comes first, Google presents another concept or object to draw. After six trials, Google shows all six drawings along with the results. Tap on a drawing to see what other people have drawn for that concept or object as well as see drawings created for other objects that look like that one. Once students have had a chance to do a set of drawings, ask students to explain what this activity had to do with prototypes. (After being given an object or concept, whatever popped into their minds was likely their prototype for that concept.) Vita (2016) suggests instructors “[c]hallenge students to get 6 drawings guessed and/or when the program is unable to guess a drawing explain why it did not fit the prototype.” What’s in it for Google? This department within Google is exploring machine learning. Being given hundreds of drawings of, say, flamingos, helps Google identify any future drawings of flamingos as flamingos.   References Vita, M. [AP Psychology Teachers]. (2016, November 18). Challenge students to get 6 drawings guessed and/or when the program is unable to guess a drawing explain why it did not fit the prototype. [Facebook group post]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/groups/556665311050841/ ... View more

Help students understand the symptoms of dementia by experiencing some of those                     symptoms themselves through the free “A Walk Through Dementia” Android app created by Alzheimer’s Research UK in cooperation with Google UK volunteers. There are four videos: a short introduction to dementia, visiting the supermarket, walking home, and making tea. The videos illustrate a number of dementia symptoms which are presented as a bulleted list at the end of each video. While the videos can be experienced in both the Android app and (3 out of 4 videos) on YouTube (see below), the more powerful experience is the interactive virtual reality (VR) version. For the VR experience, students will need an Android phone, the free “A Walk Through Dementia” app available through Google Play, headphones (which students likely already have), and VR goggles. Affordable VR goggles can be purchased here. And by affordable, I mean KnoxLabs is running a fall 2016 sale where their cardboard goggles are $5 each. There are several other goggles available for around $15 each.  A quick note of caution. Running any VR app on my Galaxy S6 phone heats it up pretty quickly. I can watch just a few minutes of VR before my app is shut down for overheating. My phone cools down rapidly, and in short order I can watch another video. Your mileage may vary. As an in-class VR activity, divide students into groups of three to six. The number of groups you have will depend on how many VR googles you have. Make sure there is at least one Android phone owner in each group. Ask the Android phone owners to search for and download from Google Play the “A Walk Through Dementia” app. Groups are to plug in the headphones, run the app, and put the phone in the goggles. Have each group member go through a different scenario, i.e. one group member experiences the grocery store, another experiences the walk home, and another experiences making tea. (If there are six students per group, each video is watched by two students.) While experiencing VR, students can sit or stand, but they absolutely should not walk. It’s too disorienting – falling would be expected. At the end of each video, the student who watched it notes the symptoms depicted. Once everyone has watched a video, each student explains to the others in the group what they experienced, being sure to outline the symptoms. Give students an opportunity to share their experience in the VR world with the class. Ask what was most surprising about what they learned. Introduction Video Link : 1780   Walking home Video Link : 1781 Making tea Video Link : 1782 ... View more

Originally posted on September 28, 2016.  We social psychologists have reeled on a couple recent occasions over news reports of unreplicated studies, including one of my favorites—the pencil-in-the-teeth versus mouth of how manipulated facial expression affects mood. But then we also revel in the visible discussions of one of our bigger ideas: implicit bias, which Hillary Clinton obviously understands: Debate moderator Lester Holt: Secretary Clinton, last week, you said we’ve got to do everything possible to improve policing, to go right at implicit bias. Do you believe that police are implicitly biased against black people? Hillary Clinton: Lester, I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other. And therefore, I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about, you know, why am I feeling this way? In some of the many experiments that reveal implicit bias, people are challenged to do as police sometimes must—to make a split-second decision whether to fire a gun, depending on whether a pictured person is holding a gun or, say, a phone. In these experiments, Blacks more than Whites are misperceived to be gun-holding. Vice presidential candidate Mike Pence apparently is unconvinced (if aware) of these experiments: “Donald Trump and I believe there's been far too much of this talk of institutional bias or racism within law enforcement.” ... View more

It’s easy to see where our perception of how much danger a child is in would influence how much moral outrage we feel toward the child’s parent. But check this out; it works the other way, too. The moral outrage we feel toward a parent influences how much danger we believe the child is in (Thomas, Stanford, & Sarnecka, 2016; see Lombrozo, 2016 for an interview with the researchers). Give half of your students scenario A and the other half scenario B. You can print these and distribute each to half of your class, or you can ask each half of the class to close their eyes while you display each scenario on the classroom screen, or you can make the scenarios available to each half of your class through your learning management system. Scenario A “Sandy A. (26) is a safety inspector and the mother of 10-month-old baby Olivia. On Tuesday evenings, Sandy takes Olivia to a "Mommy and Me" exercise class at a gym. One evening in early fall, Sandy and Olivia finish class and return to their car, which is parked in the gym's cool underground parking garage. Sandy buckles Olivia into her car seat (where Olivia immediately falls asleep), locks the car, and walks a few steps to the parking machine to pay for their parking. On her way back, Sandy is hit by a car and knocked unconscious. The driver immediately calls an ambulance, which takes Sandy to the hospital. No one realizes that Sandy had a child with her, or that Olivia is asleep in the back of the car. Olivia is in the car, asleep, for about 45 minutes until Sandy regains consciousness and alerts hospital staff” (Thomas, et.al., 2016). Scenario B “Sandy A. (26) is a safety inspector and the mother of 10-month-old Baby Olivia. On Tuesday evenings, Sandy goes to meet her best friend's husband (with whom she is having a secret affair) in his private office at the gym where he's the manager. At these times, she leaves Olivia with her mom (Olivia's grandma). One evening in early fall, Olivia's grandma is out of town. So Sandy drives to the gym and parks in the gym's cool underground parking garage. Olivia, who is buckled into her carseat, falls asleep as soon as the car stops moving. Sandy locks the car and goes into the gym. Olivia is in the car, asleep, for about 45 minutes until Sandy returns” (Thomas, et.al., 2016). After students have read their assigned scenario, ask students “to estimate (on a scale of 1 to 10) how much danger the child was in during the parent’s absence” (Thomas, et.al., 2016). Collect the responses (on paper, or through an in-class student response system, or through your learning management system) and calculate means. Note that in both cases the child’s experience is the same. The only difference is why the child was left alone. In the Thomas, et.al. study, participants rated the danger to Olivia very differently depending on whether her aloneness was due to the mother’s unintentional absence (mean of 5.47) or due to the mother’s having an affair (mean of 8.28). The authors posit that the moral outrage toward the parent, in this example the mother, comes first, and then to justify the moral outrage, we imagine the child to be in grave danger. Just a generation ago, it was the norm to leave children unsupervised. Now, parents are condemned – and sometimes arrested – for doing so. The authors “suggest that much of the recent hysteria concerning danger to unsupervised children is the product of this feedback loop, in which inflated estimates of risk lead to a new moral norm against leaving children alone, and then the need to justify moral condemnation of parents who violate this norm leads in turn to even more inflated estimates of risk, generating even stronger moral condemnation of parents who violate the norm, and so on” (Thomas, et.al., 2016). If you decide to cover this topic when you talk about parenting, introduce students to the availability heuristic – making judgments based on how available information is in memory. We hear about every child abduction or attempted abduction by a stranger in our city or region, so we anticipate the risk to be much greater than it actually is. Ask students, “What percentage of children disappear, including those who are killed, at the hands of a stranger annually?” The answer: 0.00007% -- that’s one in 1.4 million (Gardner, 2009). Small group or short writing assignment questions: What were the independent and dependent variables in this experiment? What results would you expect if the mother went to work, engaged in a volunteer activity, or did a relaxing activity instead? (Intentionally leaving the child alone was perceived as more dangerous than unintentionally leaving the child alone, and the more voluntary the behavior became, the greater the perceived risk to the child.) What if the parent were the father instead of the mother? (The same pattern, for the most part, appeared when the parent depicted was a father. Although, the risk to the child was seen as less likely when the father went to work than when the mother went to work. Is work seen as less voluntary for fathers?) Is this moral outrage inherently classist? In other words, are parents living in poverty or working class parents more likely to leave children alone out of need than middle class parents or wealthy parents? Are there benefits to children who spend some of their time unsupervised? (Increased problem-solving skills? Increased social skills developed through play with other unsupervised children?) At what age and under what circumstances should children be permitted to be unsupervised? Explain your reasoning. Have cellphones become surrogate supervisors? (Parents can call at any time. Parents can GPS track their children.)   References Gardner, D. (2009). The science of fear: How the culture of fear manipulates your brain. New York, NY: Plume. as cited in  Thomas, A.J., Stanford, P.K. & Sarnecka, B.W., (2016). No child left alone: Moral judgments about parents affect estimates of risk to children. Collabra, 2 (1). DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.33 Lombrozo, T. (2016, August 22). Why do we judge parents for putting kids at perceived - but unreal - risk? Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/08/22/490847797/why-do-we-judge-parents-for-putting-kids-at-perceived-but-unreal-risk Thomas, A.J., Stanford, P.K. & Sarnecka, B.W., (2016). No child left alone: Moral judgments about parents affect estimates of risk to children. Collabra, 2(1). DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.33 ... View more

Originally posted on April 25, 2014. We’ve all experienced it. You’re some place where screaming isn’t tolerated, some kids starts wailing, and the parents rush to quiet them down. What happens next is the twist: “They’re the best behaved kids we know,” the parents say, as their child continues to bellow. We nod our heads, feign a smile, and go back to what we’re doing. Before you pounce on me for being impatient and inexperienced, I’m here to share some good news. The more positively we view our close relationship partners, the stronger relationship we have. The best part is that the positivity doesn’t have to exist. If you ask many people, they’ll tell you their close friends are above average on nearly every positive trait. They’re funnier, smarter, and kinder than their peers. We might have positive illusions, but that doesn’t hurt anything. Or does it? Let’s return to how we see our kids. Seeing them as above average might have certain benefits. It might boost your parenting commitment and satisfaction. Who wants to devote the time and energy it takes to parent if you see your kid as a dud? A recent study suggests a potential drawback: many parents perceive their children as healthier than they actually are. The study, which drew on several investigations involving over 15,000 children, found that half of parents who have overweight or obese children rate their child as slimmer than their weight suggests. Just as people villainize parents of screaming children, it’s easy to attack parents who don’t know their children are overweight or obese. But let’s show parents some empathy. Parenting is hard. I don’t have kids, but I can’t tell you how much respect I have for people who do. Parents might not want to hurt their children’s feelings by calling them overweight or obese. They also might not know what it means to be overweight or obese. Is it simply if your son fits into his clothes? If your daughter comes home crying because a school bully called her fat? But there’s a third possibility: when we love someone, we see them in the best possible light. Instead of seeing an obese child, we see our daughter who jumps down the stairs to welcome us home from work. We see our son who loves to get dirty in the mud. When I read about the study, I tucked it away in my files. The next morning my wife and I took our two golden retrievers, Finnegan and Atticus, to the veterinarian. They’re both of our dogs, but Finnegan is mine and Atticus is my wife’s. They weighed Finnegan, who came in at a beefy 85 pounds. Then it was Atticus’s turn. “He’s much skinnier than Finnegan,” my wife, Alice, said. “Just look at him.” I looked and realized we weren’t seeing the same dog. “He looks the same to me. We feed him the same amount and give him the same amount of exercise.” “Nah, I bet he’s 70 pounds,” she said. They took Atticus away, weighed him, and returned with the results. He was exactly the same as Finnegan: 85 pounds. So, this finding might apply to dog owners, too. ... View more

Originally posted on June 2, 2014. We receive help every day. I don’t grow the food I eat, knit the clothes I wear, or assemble the TV I try to avoid. I don’t even cut my own hair. Nope, I rely on others to help me. But how do I get help when it involves asking? Amidst a recent report showing low levels of helpfulness among college professors (especially toward members of minority groups and women), I thought it would be good to help readers know how to increase helping. Here are the top 5 ways to do it (adapted from Latané and Darley, 1970). Notice help is needed. This goes both ways. I need to be aware that other people might need my help. I also need to make sure other people know I need help by asking. Realize when help is needed. If it’s an emergency, let people know it. Take personal responsibility for helping. Ignore what other people do. If you see someone in need, don’t wait for someone else to do the job. To quote Mahatma Ghandhi, “We need not wait to see what others do.” Make a decision to help. Think of this as the step between you wanting to help and you actually helping. Help! Now that you’ve made your decision, it’s time to put some feet on it. Take action and help. ... View more

Originally posted on July 3, 2014. Have you ever wondered why some people struggle to avoid certain foods, whereas others have little trouble passing on a delectable dish? Childhood eating habits, genetics, and willpower offer possible answers. But researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University identified another explanation: Thinking about eating makes food seem less exciting. If you imagine eating 10 pieces of pizza, your mind has already simulated what it’s like to eat pizza. When you see a real pizza, your brain’s pleasure centers no longer perk up. You’ve been there, done that. As a result, you consume less pizza.   In a series of experiments, people who repeatedly imagined eating a food many times ate less of that food compared with those who imagined taking a few bites. Instead of pizza, the researchers used M&M candies. People who imagined eating 30 M&M’s, compared with those who imagined eating only three, ate fewer M&M’s. By simulating eating lots of M&M’s, the thrill from eating the bite-sized candies was gone. The next time you struggle to avoid a tempting food, remember that you can train your brain not to want it. Just imagine eating large quantities of the food. Your brain will think it’s already had more than enough to eat and you will desire the food less.  ... View more

Originally posted on October 2, 2014. Everything psychological is biological. Stress wreaks havoc on our immune system, increasing our risk for many diseases. Psychological disorders can make us feel physically sick. We feel the sting of rejection as real pain. Might a healthier body help us have a stronger mind? To find out, a group of Brazilian researchers recruited a group of women who underwent bariatric bypass surgery. Before and after their surgery, the women completed a measure of executive function — a test of how well people manage their mental processes. Not surprisingly, the bariatric bypass surgery caused the women to lose weight. It also reduced their inflammation and boosted brain activity in regions associated with cognitive function. But the coolest finding was that the women’s executive functioning improved. A healthier body related to a stronger mind. No matter how disconnected our mind and body might seem, they are close friends who rely on each other for everything. By improving our physical health, we can change not only the shape of our bodies but also strengthen our minds. http://www.talkpsych.com/talk-psych-blog/2014/9/22/can-a-lean-waist-strengthen-your-mind#commenting ... View more

Originally posted on May 28, 2014. Climate change is upon us.  The recent National Climate Assessment, assembled by a large scientific panel, confirms that greenhouse gases continue to accumulate.  The planet is warming. The West Antarctic ice sheet is doomed. The seas have begun rising.  And more extreme weather will plague our future. Alas, most of the American public is not yet alarmed about this weapon of mass destruction.  The 31 percent who in 1998 thought “the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated” increased to 42 percent in 2014.  And the 34 percent of Americans who in 2014 told Gallup they worry “a great deal” about global warming was essentially the same as in 1989. Part of the problem is what psychologists and their students know as the availability heuristic. Our judgments get colored by mentally available events and images. And what’s more cognitively available than slow cli­mate change is our recently experienced local weather (see here and here).  Local recent temperature fluctuations tell us nothing about long-term planetary trends. (Our current weather is just weather.) Yet, given unusually hot local weather, people become more accepting of global climate warming, while a recent cold day reduces people’s concern about climate warming and overwhelms less memorable scientific data.  Snow in March?  “So much for global warming!” After Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey, its resi­dents’ vivid experience of extreme weather increased their environmentalism.  This suggests that a silver lining to the tragedy of more droughts, floods, heat waves, and other extreme weather may, in time, be increased public concern for climate change.  In the meantime, to offer a vivid depiction of climate change, Cal Tech scientists have created an interactive map of global temperatures over the last 120 years. ... View more

Originally posted on August 21, 2014. One of psychology’s big discoveries is our almost irresistible tendency to judge the likelihood of events by how mentally available they are—a mental shortcut that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identified as “the availability heuristic.”  Thus anything that makes information pop into mind—its vividness, recency, or distinc­tiveness—can make it seem common­place.  (Kahneman explores the power of this concept at length in Thinking Fast and Slow, which stands with William James’ Principles of Psychology on my short list of greatest-ever psychology books.) My favorite example of the availability heuristic at work is people’s misplaced fear of flying.  As I document in the upcoming Psychology, 11th Edition, from 2009 to 2011 Americans were—mile for mile—170 times more likely to die in a vehicle accident than on a sched­uled flight.  When flying, the most dangerous part of our journey is typically the drive to the airport.  In a late 2001 essay, I calculated that if—because of 9/11—we in the ensuing year flew 20 percent less and instead drove half those unflown miles, about 800 more people would die.  German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer later checked my estimate against actual traffic fatalities (why didn’t I think to do that?) and found that traffic fatalities did, indeed, jump after 9/11.  Thanks to those readily available, horrific mental images, terrorists had killed more people on American highways than died on those four ill-fated planes. The availability heuristic operates in more mundane ways as well.  This morning I awoke early at an airport hotel, where I had been waylaid after a flight delay.  The nice woman working the breakfast bar told me of how she, day after day, meets waylaid passengers experiencing weather problems, crew delays, and mechanical problems.  Her conclusion (from her mentally available sample of flyers):  something so often goes awry that if she needed to travel, she would never fly. Vivid examples make us gasp.  Probabilities we hardly grasp. ... View more

Originally posted on May 7, 2015. Despite concerns that video game-playing teaches social scripts for violence, recent research also suggests a cognitive benefit: sharpened visual attention, quickened reaction speed, and improved spatial abilities, such as eye-hand coordination. Experienced game players tend to be perceptually quick and astute. But a just-released pair of studies, by University of Oregon researcher Nash Unsworth and five collaborators, casts doubt on claims that video game-playing enhances cognitive abilities. The new studies confirmed a cognitive benefit when comparing extreme video-game players with nonplayers. But across broader and larger samples of people, game-playing correlated near zero with various cognitive abilities. “Overall, the current results suggest weak to nonexistent relations between video-game experience—across a variety of different games—and fundamental cognitive abilities (working memory, fluid intelligence, attention control, and speed of processing).” Two of the study’s co-authors, Zachary Hambrick and Randall Engle, have also published studies and research reviews that question the popular idea that brain-training games enhance older adults’ intelligence and memory. Despite the claims of companies marketing brain exercises, brain training appears to produce gains only on the trained tasks (without generalizing to other tasks). Moreover, though we might wish that thousands of hours of practice could transform us into superstar athletes or musicians, Hambrick’s other research shows that superstar achievers are distinguished at least as much by their extraordinary natural talent as by their self-disciplined daily routine. The opposite of a truth is sometimes a complementary truth. Educational interventions that aim to enhance grit, or that promote a “growth mindset” (rather than fatalistically seeing intelligence as fixed), also boost achievement. And in yet another new study, British children who display self-control become, as adults, less vulnerable to unemployment. So, video-game and brain training exercises appear to have limited cognitive benefits. Natural talent matters. Yet the disciplined ability to delay gratification and to sustain effort also matters. “If you want to look good in front of thousands,” goes a saying attributed to Damian Lillard, “you have to outwork thousands in front of nobody.” Hero Images/ Getty Images ... View more

Originally posted on January 12, 2016. Recent presidential debates offered a consensus message:  be afraid. “They’re trying to kill us all,” warned Lindsay Graham. “America is at war,” echoed Ted Cruz. “Think about the mothers who will take those children tomorrow morning to the bus stop wondering whether their children will arrive back on that bus safe and sound,” cautioned Chris Christie. The terrorist threat is real, and its results horrific. With scenes from the Paris and San Bernardino attacks flooding our minds, the politics of fear has grown. Twenty-seven percent of Americans recently identified terrorism as their biggest worry—up from 8 percent just before the Paris attacks. In two new national surveys (here and here), terrorism topped the list of “most important” issues facing the country. We are, observed Senator Marco Rubio, “really scared and worried” . . . and thus the fears of Syrian refugees, or even all Muslims. We may, however, be too afraid of terrorism, and too little afraid of other much greater perils.  Moreover, fearing the wrong things has social and political consequences, as I explain here (a site that also offers other behavioral scientists’ reflections on important scientific news). ... View more