In the June 2022 edition of the APA Monitor on Psychology is an excellent article on the psychology of traffic safety. The article features David Strayer’s “four horsemen of death”: speed, impairment, fatigue, and distraction. Given the number and breadth of psychological concepts covered, this article provides fodder for a good end-of-term assignment. It may also save the lives of your students. Note that the journalist uses the term “crash” rather than “accident.” “Crash” is the preferred term by U.S. government agencies, such as the CDC and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The word “accident” implies an incident that could not be avoided. The word “crash” does not carry that connotation. Giving the causes of traffic fatalities are due to driver decision-making, whether it be the driver of the vehicle or the driver of another vehicle, “crash” is a better descriptor than “accident.”   Ask students to read the article “Improving Traffic Safety” (Pappas, 2022), and then answer the following questions. How many people died on U.S. roadways in 2020? Speed. What percentage of the 2020 traffic fatalities were estimated to be caused by excessive speed? The article describes three ways that our environment can contribute to unsafe driving. Take a photo of a road in your area that illustrates one or more of these environmental hazards. Explain. The article also describes three ways that our environment can contribute to safe driving. Take a photo of a road in your area that illustrates one or more of these environmental benefits. Explain. In a survey of drivers at the beginning of the pandemic, researchers “saw an increase in respondents saying they were more likely to break the law because they knew they were less likely to be caught.” Explain this finding in terms of operant conditioning. With fewer people on the roads during the pandemic shut-down, researchers speculate that street racing may have increased. What Ontario law led to a reduction in street racing? Explain this effect in terms of operant conditioning. If you are primarily a driver, what can you do to reduce your chances of dying in a car crash due to speed? If you primarily a passenger, what can you do to reduce your chances of dying in a car crash due to speed? Impairment. What percentage of the 2020 traffic fatalities were estimated to be caused by impaired driving? Based on your reading of the article, describe the relationship between stress, alcohol, and driving while impaired. What Big Five personality trait is associated with a history of driving while impaired and reckless driving? Given your knowledge of this trait, why might that association exist? Fatigue. What percentage of the 2020 traffic fatalities were estimated to be caused by fatigue? Why might this number be an underestimation? Summarize what you learned in this course about the effects of sleep deprivation. Choose five effects, and for each, briefly explain how it could negatively effect driving.   According to the article, what have Australian highway authorities done to combat boredom on empty stretches of highway? Distraction. What percentage of the 2020 traffic fatalities were estimated to be caused by distracted driving? Explain how stress may contribute to distracted driving. Explain how the design of cars may contribute to distracted driving. Give at least one example. Conclusion. What was the most surprising thing you learned in this article? Explain. Identify at least one concept you learned in this course that could apply to speed, impairment, fatigue, or distraction but was not discussed in the article. Briefly describe the concept, and then explain how it could be a contributor to car crashes.   Reference Pappas, S. (2022, June). Improving traffic safety. Monitor on Psychology, 53(4), 46–55.       ... View more

Do you remember the "class clown?" Were YOU the funny one in school? New research suggests that the class clowns may actually be the smartest kids in class! https://www.iflscience.com/brain/the-class-clown-may-be-the-smartest-kid-in-school-suggests-new-study/ ... View more

While I am still not close to retirement, I am certainly closer to retirement than I am to my first year of teaching. This August will be the 30th anniversary of when I stepped in front of a classroom as a person of authority. I was a graduate student leading discussion sections once a week for a social psych course. The following fall, I taught my own course for the first time. This anniversary has put me in a reflective mood.  Here is what I know now that I wish I had known then. Develop a teaching persona   Teaching is a performance. When you step in front of a class, you must consider who your students are and how you can best help those students understand your course material. In doesn’t matter how far over you are on the Big Five trait of introversion. You have a role to play.    Do not take cheating personally   Some of your students will cheat. And some of those who cheat, you will catch. It will feel like a personal affront, but student cheating is not about you. When feeling overwhelmed—sometimes brought on by procrastination, but not always—students will go to what has worked for them, or their friends, before. They put their hands into their bag of shortcuts and hope that what they pull out works. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does not. Make sure there are consequences for cheating. However, again, do not take it personally, because it is not about you.   Students earn grades   Instructors do not give grades. Instructors document the grades students earn.   Someday, a student will come to you begging for a few more points because if they do not get X grade in your course, they will lose their scholarship, financial aid, or something else important to them. If a student is in that position, your course alone was not enough to do that. A string of courses that came before brought the student to this point. Your course is just the latest one in the series.   Stick to your policies   Whatever policies you have identified in your syllabus, do not make exceptions to them—unless your policy says that you will make exceptions. If you are going to make exceptions, think very carefully about how you will decide who gets an exception.   If you have a clear no-late-assignment-with-no-exceptions policy, a student asks you to make an exception, and you do, that is unfair to all of the students who read the policy in your syllabus, took you at your word, and did not ask for an exception.   Do not obsess over that one negative comment in your course evaluations   What is especially frustrating about course evaluations is that the course is over leaving you unable to address your students’ comments. There is no closure.   Early in my teaching career, I had a student who wrote, “She should write more than just the outline on the board, because when it came time to study for the test, all I had was the outline.” In a 15-week semester, this student never figured out that they could write more than what I wrote. I had no way to tell the student. When reading your course evaluations, remember that these are student perceptions. Find the patterns first. What are most students saying? What should you keep doing next term? What changes should you make? In some cases, for example, you do not need to change what you do, but, instead, make the rationale for what you do clearer.   Now you can look at the comments that did not fit into the patterns you found. If one student, for example, reports that you did not turn graded work back in a timely manner, but everyone else reports that you did, you can safely ignore this outlier. This student may have a different definition of “timely manner.” In fact, the student may have even thought that “timely manner” means you turned work back after a lot of time had passed. The only thing you know is that this comment is the polar opposite of what everyone else in your course said. Treat it as the outlier it is.   In anonymous course evaluations, student biases—both implicit and explicit—can affect how students rate their instructors. If you are young, female, or a person of color, you should be particularly cautious in interpreting your evaluations. More so if you are all three. Students are responsible for their own learning Just because you say it, does not mean that students will remember it. What is teaching? Teaching is not talking. Teaching is not “covering” content. Teaching is not flipping through presentation slides. Teaching is helping students do the hard work of learning.   You are using a good textbook. Trust the authors to deliver the content. Your job is to help students with the content they are struggling with. Find out what they are struggling with and focus on that -- you can ask via your course management system before class, use a classroom response system, or just ask them in class (pairs or small group discussions for just a few minutes, then have each group report out). I tell my students that the textbook is their first source of information. I am there to help the textbook. It is okay to use your textbook in class If a student asks a question about core content that you are still fuzzy about yourself, like the difference between positive and negative reinforcement, it is okay to say, "Let's walk through it together." Pull out the book, open to those pages, and put it under your document camera. Modeling the process of thinking through a question is just as valuable as having an answer at the ready.  It is okay to guess, as long as you say that you are guessing For something that is outside the book's core content, it is okay to take a guess—as long as you tell students you are guessing. Walk students through your thought process; pull in concepts you have covered before and introduce students to new concepts. And, no, after class you do not have to look up an answer and report back what you found at the next class session. If you want to know, look it up. If you think it will be of wide enough interest, post it to your course management system.  Even after 30 years in the classroom, students still ask questions I have never heard before. You cannot anticipate them all. Grading tips As it may have been hard for your students to get started doing this assignment, it may be just as hard for you to grade them. To help you get started, remove barriers between you and your grading. Get everything out that you need. Open your course management system to the right place. You may not be ready to grade, but you have set up everything so that when you are, you do not have to do anything except start. Grade in spurts. Grade five student assignments, stand up and stretch. Grade another five. The last assignment you grade deserves the same attention as the first one. Use a solid rubric and consider two-tiered grading. In the first round, you grade using just the rubric with minimal comments. Invite students who would like more feedback to ask for it. For those students who do, go back into their assignments, and write more detailed comments. Finally, take care of yourself Teaching takes a lot of energy. Sleep. Exercise. Eat well. Have fun. ... 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

Ever since I decided to pare down the personality section of my Intro Psych course to modern day theories of personality and their accompanying research, I have been on the lookout for interesting content to add. The journal Psychological Science recently published a fascinating – to me anyway – article on the relationship between one’s own personality and the ideal personality characteristics of particular jobs and the impact that relationship has on income (Denissen et al., 2017). Jaap Denissen and his colleagues used Big Five trait data from 8,458 individuals who all had full-time work for the previous year. For each job held by the participants, occupation experts identified the ideal Big Five traits a person in that job should have. Take a look at the ratings for each job, available through the Open Science Framework (OSF). Before sharing these data with your students now would be a good time to remind them that “psychology doesn’t deal in certainties; it deals in probabilities.” Your students’ personality traits will not definitively determine their future income, but if we know their personality traits and the job that they may have, we can figure the probability of them having a certain level of income. After covering the Big Five, can your students assign the same traits to jobs as this study's experts?  Which job goes with which level of the trait, one is high and the other is low? Answers at the bottom of the post. Extraversion: Actor Bookkeeper Agreeableness: Prison guard Religious professional Conscientiousness: Financial manager Decorator Emotional stability Firefighter Embroiderer Openness Farm hand Actor Curious to know the ratings the experts assigned for professors in higher education? All ratings are on a 7-point scale; higher numbers mean more of the trait is expected by the job. Extraversion: 5.7 Agreeableness: 4.5 Conscientiousness: 5.7 Emotional stability: 5.8 Openness: 4.7 Now, that’s all really interesting, right? But here’s where it gets downright fascinating. Looking just at the extraversion response surface analysis (RSA) below, people who were high in extraversion (“actual personality”) and were in a high extraversion job (“demanded personality”) had the highest income (vertical axis; green is higher income and orange is lower). Those who were in mismatched jobs (low extraversion person in a high extraversion job or vice versa) had lower income. And those low in extraversion in a low extraversion job also had lower incomes. In other words, those who are lowest in extraversion will have the lowest incomes as compared to their fellow moderate and high extraverts, regardless of the amount of extraversion demanded by the job. (For more on this topic, see Susan Cain’s book Quiet.) [Figure reprinted with permission of the author. For this and the RSA figures for emotional stability, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, see the supplemental materials in OSF. For the RSA figure for openness, please see the original article, also available in OSF.] Emotional stability shows essentially the same pattern. High emotional stability people earned the most money in high emotional stability jobs, e.g., firefighter. Low emotional stability people earned less money in high emotional stability jobs. Ask students to consider why this might be; invite students to share their thinking. For conscientiousness, same thing, except that jobs that require high conscientiousness generally provide higher incomes. High conscientiousness people in high conscientiousness jobs made the most money. Low conscientiousness people in high conscientiousness jobs still made money, just not as much as their high conscientiousness counterparts. Who made the least money in the conscientiousness arena? High conscientiousness people in low conscientiousness jobs. Again, give your students a couple minutes to think about why that may be. For those high conscientiousness employees, perhaps “perfection is the enemy of the good.” In all fairness, though, there are no low conscientiousness jobs, just lower conscientiousness jobs. The lowest jobs came in at 5.17 (again, max score is 7).   High openness people in high openness jobs, e.g., actor, had higher incomes than low openness people in high openness jobs. Again, ask students to consider why this may be. That leaves agreeableness. Who made the least money in this trait? High agreeableness people in low agreeableness jobs, e.g., prison guard. Who made the most money in this trait? Low agreeableness people in moderately low agreeableness jobs, e.g., taxi driver. One last time, ask students to consider why this may be. Alternatively, if you want to give students some practice in reading graphs, divide the class into small groups of 3 to 4 students each. Give each group a different trait RSA. Ask each group to briefly describe the graph, perhaps prompt with something like, “What is the relationship between a person’s personality trait and the trait demanded by the job in terms of the impact that relationship has on income?” Walk through the RSA for one trait first, and then distribute the other four traits to the groups.   References Denissen, J. J. A., Bleidorn, W., Hennecke, M., Luhmann, M., Orth, U., Specht, J., & Zimmermann, J. (2017). Uncovering the Power of Personality to Shape Income. Psychological Science, 95679761772443. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617724435   Extraversion: Actor (high) Bookkeeper (low) Agreeableness: Prison guard (low) Religious professional (high) Conscientiousness: Financial manager (high) Decorator (low) Emotional stability Firefighter (high) Embroiderer (low) Openness Farm hand (low) Actor (high) ... View more

Looking for a great summer read? If you like Nate Silver’s quantitative assessments of politics and sports, you will love Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s new book on big data revelations about our human interests, traits, and behaviors. By drilling down through millions of data points, often from people’s anonymous Google searches, he offers insights into racial prejudice, sexual orientation, child abuse, and even the age at which people’s long-term sports loyalties crystallize.   With data science he can also test popular ideas. Was Freud right to suppose that phallic symbols in dreams, and innuendos in word slips, reveal our unconscious sexuality? Is the man who dreamed of eating a banana on his wedding day “secretly thinking of a penis”? Is typing “lipsdick” when you meant “lipstick” an eruption of your hidden desire?   In search of answers, Stephens-Davidowitz analyzed whether phallic-shaped foods “sneak into our dreams with unexpected frequency.” His answer: They do not. In dreams, bananas are the second most common fruit . . . and they also are the second most consumed fruit. Cucumbers are the seventh most dreamt vegetable, and the seventh most consumed vegetable.   In search of Freudian slips, he analyzed 40,000 typing errors collected by Microsoft. A few were sexually tinged—“sexurity” instead of “security,” and “cocks” instead of “rocks.” But then there also were innocent slips such as “pindows,” “fegetables,” and “aftermoons.” After analyzing the frequency of various errors in random typos, Stephens-Davidowitz concludes that “People make lots of mistakes.” And when you make enough, you can expect an occasional and statistically predictable miscue. Searching the quarter million e-mails I’ve received since 2000, for example, I see that friends have written me about their experiences with “Wisconsin Pubic Radio,” with hearing access in “pubic venues” and with “pubic access,” and in their work as a national organization’s “Director of Pubic Policy.”   Thus, “Freud’s theory that errors reveal our subconscious wants is indeed falsifiable—and, according to my analysis of the data, false.” ... View more

After covering the Big Five personality traits, ask students to get into small groups and pose these questions. Thinking about your ideal instructor, rank order the Big Five traits according to the instructor’s traits that are most important to you. For each of those traits, what behavior would you expect to see from that instructor? Once discussion dies down, start with one of the Big Five traits, say extraversion, and ask volunteers to report where they scored their ideal instructor on that trait, why they chose that score, and what behavior did they expect to see from an instructor with that trait score. After you have gone through all of the traits, share with students a few peer-reviewed studies. A study reported in Inside Higher Ed (Elmes, 2017) using a British sample found that students rank ordered the traits they like to see in an instructor this way: conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion, openness, and neuroticism. Chamorro-Premuzic, et.al. (2008) found students had a preference for instructors who were low in neuroticism and high in conscientiousness. Interestingly, students preferred instructors who matched themselves on openness and conscientiousness. High openness-scoring students preferred high openness-scoring instructors, for example. A 2005 study, also by Adrian Furnham and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic found that “students tended to prefer conscientious, open, and stable lecturers, though correlations revealed that these preferences were largely a function of students' own [emphasis in original] personality traits.” Again, this was true for openness, but this time instead of conscientiousness, it was agreeableness. Students preferred an instructor who scored similarly to them on agreeableness. Do student perceptions of instructor personality affect student evaluations of teaching? Yep. When students perceived their instructor as high on conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, and extraversion, students rated the course and the instructor’s ability to teach as high. When students perceived their instructor as high on neuroticism, students rated the course and the instructor’s ability to teach as low. What about student personality traits? Students high in agreeableness were more likely to rate their instructor’s ability to teach as high (Patrick, 2011). No surprise; they’re agreeable! While students may have preferences for instructor personality, is there any evidence that instructor personality affects student performance in the course? I haven’t found any, but if someone knows of some, please let me know. To conclude your class discussion, ask students which of the Big Five traits is most strongly correlated with both high school and college GPA. The answer? Conscientiousness (Noftle and Robins, 2007).   References Chamorro-Premuzic, T., Furnham, A., Christopher, A. N., Garwood, J., & Martin, G. N. (2008). Birds of a feather: Students’ preferences for lecturers’ personalities as predicted by their own personality and learning approaches. Personality and Individual Differences, 44(4), 965-976. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2007.10.032   Elmes, J. (2017, May 18). Who wants a neurotic professor? Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/18/british-study-examines-traits-students-want-and-dont-want-professors Furnham, A., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2005). Individual differences in students' preferences for lecturers' personalities. Journal of Individual Differences, 26(4), 176-184. doi:10.1027/1614-0001.26.4.176 Noftle, E. E., & Robins, R. W. (n.d.). Personality predictors of academic outcomes: Big Five correlates of GPA and SAT scores. PsycEXTRA Dataset. doi:10.1037/e514412014-495 Patrick, C. L. (2011). Student evaluations of teaching: Effects of the Big Five personality traits, grades and the validity hypothesis. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 36(2), 239-249. doi:10.1080/02602930903308258 ... View more

“Egocentricism,” as every psychology student has read, was Jean Piaget’s description of preschoolers’ inability to take another person’s perspective. The child standing between you and the TV just can’t see your perspective.   And it’s not just children. As Nathan DeWall and I explain in Psychology, 11 th Edition, Even we adults may overestimate the extent to which others share our opinions and perspectives, a trait known as the curse of knowledge. We assume that something will be clear to others if it is clear to us, or that email recipients will “hear” our “just kidding” intent (Epley et al., 2004; Kruger et al., 2005). Perhaps you can recall asking someone to guess a simple tune such as “Happy Birthday” as you clapped or tapped it out. With the tune in your head, it seemed so obvious! But you suffered the egocentric curse of knowledge, by assuming that what was in your head was also in someone else’s.   In the May/June Scientific American Mind (alas, its last print issue), Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik describe a “Venus effect” (previously noted by University of Liverpool psychologist Marco Bertamini and his colleagues). In various art depictions, the grand masters have depicted their subjects looking toward a mirror. Reubens' "Venus in Front of a Mirror" Veláquez's "Rokeby Venus"                               Many people presume that Venus, in the image above, is looking at (and admiring) herself in the mirror. If that was your surmise (as it was mine, when viewing “Rokeby Venus”), then you are not taking her perspective. Think: If you, from your viewing perspective, can see her face in the mirror, then she must see yours (not hers). It’s akin to being a backseat car passenger and seeing the driver’s face in the mirror—which tells you that the driver sees your face in the same mirror.   As the Venus effect reminds us, egocentricism is not just for children. ... View more

Originally posted on August 24, 2016. In an earlier post, I mentioned a report that says “that narcissists make good first impressions, but over time, their arrogance, bragging, and aggressiveness gets old.” This finding replicated an earlier study showing that, in the laboratory, people’s initially positive impressions of narcissists eventually turn negative. People’s general dislike of narcissistic, egotistical people is also explored in a 1997 chapter by Wake Forest University social psychologist Mark Leary and three others—one of whom (fun fact) was Leary’s student collaborator, Tim Duncan . . . who just retired after an acclaimed 19-year National Basketball Association career with the San Antonio Spurs. I earlier wondered: “Will this [narcissists don’t wear well] phenomenon hold true for Trump and eventually deflate his popularity during this U.S. presidential campaign season?” The presidential horse race isn’t over until it’s over. The New York Times projects that Hillary Clinton’s current chance of losing equals an NFL field goal kicker’s chance of missing a 20-yard-line attempt (which happens). But so far in polls, betting markets, and statistical projections (below), Trump’s inferred narcissism seems to be playing out much as the research would predict. THE NEW YORK TIMES UPSHOT PROJECTION OF EACH CANDIDATE’S CHANCE OF WINNING. ... View more

Originally posted on August 16, 2016. In Psychology, 11th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I illustrate brain plasticity with a 6-year-old girl who had most of her right hemisphere removed to end life-threatening seizures. In one of the most astonishing neuroscience findings, her remaining hemisphere compensated by putting other areas to work, enabling her to function well. One medical team, reflecting on other child hemispherectomies, reported being “awed” by how well the children had retained their memory, personality, and humor. The younger the child, the greater the chance that the remaining hemisphere can take over the missing hemisphere’s functions. Only recently did I become aware—thanks to a delightful new article by Scott Lilienfeld and Steven Jay Lynn—of a review of 52 hemispherectomy cases by Benjamin S. Carson and six of his Johns Hopkins colleagues. Nearly half of the 52, the Carson team reported, were living successful independent lives—at their age level in school or working productively. And, yes, for the rest of the story, “Carson” is that Benjamin Carson . . . or as he later became known to millions of Americans, 2016 Republican presidential hopeful, Ben Carson. ... View more

Originally posted on April 5, 2014. Each year, the American government spends billions of dollars to help students who struggle to meet their potential. These students languish in traditional school programs. They struggle socially. And they ultimately have less impact on society than they might if they had received educational opportunities that maximized their abilities. New research suggests that students who occupy this group are the ones we often worry about the least: super smart kids. The study followed several hundred students from age 13 to 38. At age 13, all of the students showed testing ability that placed them in the top 0.01 percent of students their age. Put another way, the study participants outscored students in the top 1 percent by a factor of ten. That’s pretty smart! The super smart kids flourished. Their rate of earned doctorates dwarfed the average American rate: 44 percent compared to 2 percent. They held jobs that gave them influence over millions of dollars and, in some cases, millions of lives. It’s easy to shut the book there. Super smart kids succeed. Big deal. But these super smart kids often experience challenges that also plague so-called “at-risk” students. They don’t have class material that pushes them intellectually. Before their first day of class, they know the course material. What happens next? What do they do for the next six to eight hours while their peers struggle to understand the material they’ve already mastered? The super smart kids might also struggle to connect socially. If academics are such a breeze, might it be difficult to relate to your peers? Might you experience stress when your peers have to study at night while you look for other opportunities to pique your intellectual interests? Might you act less intelligent to fit in? ... View more

Originally posted on April 11, 2014. While attending this year’s Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting, I chaired a data blitz session. The session fell on February 14. Valentine’s Day. Hundreds of people attended, all eager to hear exciting talks that lasted no more than 5 minutes. All of the talks delivered on expectations. One of them caused all heads to perk up and pay attention. The talk, given by Amy Moors of the University of Michigan (and co-authored by Terri Conley, Robin Edelstein, and William Chopik), dealt with consensual non-monogamy. This is a psychological term researchers use to describe people who engage in more than one romantic relationships simultaneously, and whose relationship partners know and approve. The talk had two main points. Consensual non-monogamy is more common than you might think. Moors reported she and her colleagues consistently find that approximately 4-5% of peoplereport being consensually non-monogamous. To put that in perspective, consider a university of 20,000 students. According to these estimates, roughly 800 to 1000 of these students identify as consensually non-monogamous. Who are these students? The authors argue that people who engage in consensual non-monogamy might not feel comfortable getting emotionally close to others and may instead prefer to keep their sense of autonomy. As a result, they might keep others at a distance. People with this relationship style have what is called avoidant attachment. The more people identified as avoidantly attached, the more positively they evaluated consensually non-monogamous relationships. Avoidantly attached people were also more likely to report being in a consensually non-monogamous relationship. When I spoke to others about the talk, they were most surprised about the higher-than-expected rates of consensual non-monogamy. This reaction begs the question of why people assume what they do about romantic relationships. Just as Tom Gilovich has shown many ways that people think they “know what isn't so,” what we think we know about relationships doesn't always match reality. ... View more

Originally posted on April 17, 2014. Ask many people what their signature says about them and they’ll give you a pat answer: “My name.” Does your signature say more than that? A cottage industry exists, in which “graphoanalysts” will tell us how our penmanship illustrates our ambitions, insecurities, and intuitive abilities. (See here, for an example). But if we don’t want to turn to a graphoanalyst, can psychological science offer a substitute? It can—and the best place to start is how big you write your name. The bigger you write your name, the more likely you hold a powerful position. For example, tenured, compared to nontenured, American Professors have bigger signatures. Ask people to imagine being the U.S. president, compared to a lower status person, and the chances of their signature size increasing go up. These effects aren’t unique to Americans. They have been replicated in Irani samples, too. A recent suite of studies caught my attention. They showed that subliminally linking positive words to a person’s identity increased the person’s signature size. In one study, Oxford University students viewed either positive words (happy, smart) or neutral words (bench, paper). To link the words to participant’s sense of identity, the researchers presented the word ‘I’ quickly before each word. Next, they had participants sign their names. Imagine being part of the study. You sign your name at the beginning, complete a computer task, and then sign your name again. You don’t know it, but you may have had your self-esteem raised. And if you did, your signature size likely grew without you knowing it. We sign our names often, which might help explain why we come to like the letters in our name more than other letters. The next time someone asks for your signature, take a good look at how much paper real estate it uses. It might say more about you than you think.   ... View more

Originally posted on May 5, 2014. From an early age, I wanted to be an astronaut. I memorized Mercury astronaut missions. I dreamt of using a manned maneurvering unit to glide through space. I cried when the Challenger exploded. I still dream of going to space, but I know it’s a long shot. Still, space exploration captivates me. What will be the biggest obstacle to a successful Mars mission? It won’t be inadequate fuel, faulty aerodynamics, or clunky helmets. Social isolation is the greatest barrier to interplanetary travel. Don’t believe me? Think about the past 520 days of your life (about a year and five months). That’s how long it takes to travel to Mars and return. How many people did you see during that time? How many conversations did you have? Did you attend a sporting event? A play? A worship service? Maybe a loved one was born or passed away. Now wipe those experiences away. Instead, imagine that during this period of your life you lived in cramped quarters with only five other people, no fresh air, and no sunlight. This is not a mere thought experiment. The experiment happened, with funds from the Russian Academy of Sciences. What happened? Quite a bit. In research recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the six volunteer marsonauts completed lots of tasks to keep their minds fresh. They also slept like babies without the daily rigmarole of daily work commutes, grocery shopping, or other daily drivel. Then the guys started sleeping like polar bears in hibernation. Then they started doing less, becoming even more sedentary amidst almost endless boredom. Space is only cool for so long. The good news? They all made it. There weren’t any major scuffles, and the guys probably formed lifelong friendships. They even showed signs of cognitive improvement. But the marsonaut volunteers each handled the prolonged social isolation differently. One of them shifted to a 25-hr sleep-wake schedule, which meant that he was alone (awake or asleep) 20% of the 520 day mock mission. As the researchers sift through their massive data set (to put it in perspective, they measured 4.396 million minutes of sleep!), I’m sure we’ll learn more about the psychological consequences of prolonged social isolation. For now, we can still look into the night sky, find the Red Planet, and dream of people visiting sometime in our generation. We know they’ll sleep well—and a lot. ... View more

Originally posted May 13, 2014. We might not realize it, but our names hold the key to how much people trust us. Our actual name might not matter. It is how easily you can pronounce a person’s name that counts. Imagine the following scenario. You walk into an auto repair shop to get your car fixed. A smiling man greets you at the door, shakes your hand, and says, “How are you?” You look at his uniform, which has his name printed in an oval patch. It says, “Yvgeny.” Having spent no time in Russia, you struggle to pronounce his name. Would your botched pronunciation affect how much you trusted your would-be mechanic? It would. In a recent investigation, people with easily pronounceable names, versus hard to pronounce names, were rated as less dangerous, more positive, and more trustworthy. The next time you struggle to pronounce someone’s name, give that person a break. We don’t pick the names our parents give us. Should we also give more credit to those who have triumphed despite having hard to pronounce names? Did Quvenzhané Wallis need to do more to earn her Oscar nomination than Naomi Watts did? We’ll never know. Until we do, think of the people you choose to include in your life. We have limited energy and only include a few people in our social networks. Of the ones you chose, did their easy to pronounce names give them an edge? ... View more