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