Have a few minutes? Listen to this APA podcast episode discussing why human infants have such long periods of growth and what this means for the development of our society! https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/childrens-amazing-brains ... View more

Can privacy coexist with technology that reads and changes brain activity? https://www.sciencenews.org/article/technology-brain-activity-read-change-thoughts-privacy-ethics ... View more

At some point in college or grad school, I was given a short article that explained the different sections of a typical psychology journal article. I have a vague memory of being told to always read the abstract first, but beyond that, I don’t remember be given any guidance on how to actually read the article. Eventually I figured out that journal articles that are sharing new research are not meant to be read from beginning to end. True confession: I started doing this pretty early in my journal-article-reading career, but I felt guilty about it. I had no reason to feel guilty. Wish I would have known that then. The Learning Scientists blog has a nice collection of articles on how to read a research journal article. Take a look at that list to see if there is anything there you want to share with your students that particularly meets your goals. For example, the library at Teesside University has brief descriptions of each article section. If you’d like your students to hear from academics themselves on how they approach research journal articles, the Science article is a good choice. Alternatively, you may choose to give your students a few easy-to-read articles and ask your students to sort out the different elements of a research article. Ask your students to look at (not necessarily “read”), say, three of the following articles, all of which have 12 or fewer pages of text. Work with your librarians to get permalinks to this articles from your library’s databases. Barry, C. T., McDougall, K. H., Anderson, A. C., Perkins, M. D., Lee-Rowland, L. M., Bender, I., & Charles, N. E. (2019). ‘Check your selfie before you wreck your selfie’: Personality ratings of Instagram users as a function of self-image posts. Journal of Research in Personality, 82, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2019.07.001 Gosnell, C. L. (2019). Receiving quality positive event support from peers may enhance student connection and the learning environment. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000178 Howe, L. C., Goyer, J. P., & Crum, A. J. (2017). Harnessing the placebo effect: Exploring the influence of physician characteristics on placebo response. Health Psychology, 36(11), 1074–1082. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0000499.supp Hyman, I. E., Boss, S. M., Wise, B. M., McKenzie, K. E., & Caggiano, J. M. (2010). Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 24, 597–607. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1638 Reed, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2017). Learning on hold: Cell phones sidetrack parent-child interactions. Developmental Psychology, 53(8), 1428–1436. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000292 Rhodes, M., Leslie, S. J., Yee, K. M., & Saunders, K. (2019). Subtle linguistic cues increase girls’ engagement in science. Psychological Science, 30(3), 455–466. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618823670 Soicher, R. N., & Gurung, R. A. R. (2017). Do exam wrappers increase metacognition and performance? A single course intervention. Psychology Learning and Teaching, 16(1), 64–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725716661872 Wirth, J. H., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2009). The role of gender in mental-illness stigma: A national experiment. Psychological Science, 20(2), 169–173. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02282.x Give your students the following instructions and questions. Amend them to your liking. Skim each of these three articles: Barry, C. T., McDougall, K. H., Anderson, A. C., Perkins, M. D., Lee-Rowland, L. M., Bender, I., & Charles, N. E. (2019). ‘Check your selfie before you wreck your selfie’: Personality ratings of Instagram users as a function of self-image posts. Journal of Research in Personality, 82, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2019.07.001 Gosnell, C. L. (2019). Receiving quality positive event support from peers may enhance student connection and the learning environment. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000178 Howe, L. C., Goyer, J. P., & Crum, A. J. (2017). Harnessing the placebo effect: Exploring the influence of physician characteristics on placebo response. Health Psychology, 36(11), 1074–1082. https://doi.org/10.1037/hea0000499.supp Research articles published in journals follow some basic conventions that are designed to make them easy for researchers and students to read. Almost all research articles have these six main components, and always in this order. Using the three articles you skimmed, your goal is to identify the basic structure of research articles. For each component, answer the questions given. Abstract In less than 50 words, describe the purpose of the abstract. Introduction (usually not labeled, but it always comes after the abstract) In less than 50 words, describe the purpose of the introduction. The research hypotheses can almost always be found near the end of the introduction. Identify at least one hypothesis from each article. Method In less than 50 words, describe the purpose of the methods section. In the methods section, you will see that all of the articles contain similar information. Identify three different types of information that is common across all three articles. Results In less than 50 words, describe the purpose of the results section. If you don’t understand much of what is written in this section, that’s okay. This section is written for fellow researchers, not Intro Psych students. Copy/paste (use quotation marks!) one sentence from the results section of each article that made little or no sense to you. Discussion In less than 50 words, describe the purpose of the discussion section. References In less than 50 words, describe the purpose of the references section. Choose one reference from each article that, based on the title alone, you might be interested in reading. How would you go about getting that article? Researchers almost always read the abstract first. After that, what they read next depends on why they are looking at the article at all. For each of the following scenarios, match the researcher with the section of the article they are likely to read first after the abstract: Introduction, method, results, discussion, references. A. Dr. Akiya Yagi wanted to read more about the conclusions the researchers drew from having done this study. B. Dr. Selva Hernandez-Lopez is doing research on these same psychological concepts, and she’s looking for useful research articles that she may have missed. C. Dr. DeAndre Thomas is looking for different ways to measure a particular psychological concept. D. Dr. Kaitlyn Kronvalds read some information in the abstract that made her wonder about the statistics that were used to analyze the data. E. Dr. Bahiya Cham is about start doing research on a different set of psychological concepts and wants to learn more about the different theories behind those concepts and how those theories are being used to generate hypotheses.   ... View more

While close friendships may never change, this article argues that our casual friendships have been seriously challenged - if not completely erased - by the pandemic. Have your friendships changed as a result of covid? https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/pandemic-goodbye-casual-friends/617839/ ... View more

I just finished reading Evan Nesterak’s Behavioral Scientist interview with Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant about his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Grant discussed an interaction he had with Danny Kahneman that has given me much to think about. After a talk Grant gave, Kahneman, who was in the audience, came up to him afterward and said, “That was wonderful. I was wrong.” Grant found the reaction unexpected. Upon later inquiring what Kahneman meant by that, Kahneman replied (Grant’s paraphrase), “No one enjoys being wrong, but I do enjoy having been wrong, because it means I am now less wrong than I was before.” I was immediately reminded of an email I received from a student from a recent course. After receiving a lower-than-typical score on an assignment, she emailed me to thank me for the explanation of a particular concept in the rubric. She was glad she got that concept wrong because now she understands the concept much better than she did before. Like Kahneman, she “enjoy[ed] having been wrong, because it means [she is] now less wrong than [she] was before.” Since this is not the kind of email I usually receive from students, I wrote her back, and asked how she came to take that view. She said when she first went to college years ago, that was most certainly not her attitude. Instead, her primary reaction to being wrong was to be defensive. It was after she dropped out of school she realized how much her defensiveness kept her from learning. In her job, she started seeing that every time she was wrong, she learned something new, so she started seeing being wrong as a good thing. Being wrong is evidence of learning. And it was with that attitude that she came back to college. You may not be surprised to learn that she earned an A in the course. Again, Adam Grant paraphrasing Danny Kahneman, “Finding out that I was wrong is the only way I’m sure that I’ve learned anything. Otherwise, I’m just going around and living in a world that’s dominated by confirmation bias, or desirability bias. And I’m just affirming the things I already think I know.” What helps is that, as Grant reports, Kahneman separates himself from his ideas. Ideas are just ideas, not who he is. Ideas are easy to ditch; our identity is not. Early in my career, I learned that it was freeing to say, “I don’t know.” I teach a lot of Intro Psych. Students can come up with a lot of questions about people and why we do what we do. While I know more now about psychology than I did then, I still don’t know everything. Heck, our science of psychology does not know everything. My identity as a psychology instructor was not wrapped up in knowing absolutely everything about psychology. As a bonus, saying “I don’t know” made it easier for students to trust me when I did respond to a question with something that I knew. Or was pretty sure I knew.   Next, I learned that it was freeing to say, “I don’t know, but I would guess…” and then provide my guess, while also sharing my thinking about why I was guessing that. I love this kind of thinking on my feet. And, by pulling in content previously covered in the course, previewing content coming up, and content not covered in the course, students get to see how different areas of psychology are connected – or, rather, could be connected if my guess is correct. If a particularly motivated student did some research into the question, and reported back a different answer, I got practice is saying, “Thanks! I was wrong.” In recent years, I’ve gotten more comfortable saying that. I can’t say that I’m to the point of embracing “wrong” like my student and Danny Kahneman are, but I’m closer than I used to be. Psychologist Paul Meehl was renowned for telling his students near the beginning of a course that half of what he was going to tell them was wrong; he just didn’t know which half. That’s science. With every study, we learn where our ideas are wrong, which ideas need to change. For Danny Kahneman, learning where he is wrong is just another data point. Talk about the scientific attitude! Now the million dollar question. While I can work on reframing my own thoughts around being wrong and what it means to be wrong, how can I help my students do that same important reframing? While it’s important for learning, it’s much bigger than that. Kahneman has it exactly right—when we can admit we are wrong, confirmation bias, belief perseverance, <insert just about any bias>, cognitive dissonance all disappear. If those who believed the rhetoric of QAnon could say, “I was wrong,” like Lekka Perron has done, imagine how freeing it would be for them. Perhaps the best way to help our students see being wrong as learning something new is to model it ourselves. “I believed X, but the preponderance of the evidence points to Y. I was wrong, and now I’m less wrong than I was before.” ... View more

Everyone deserves a great relationship. Have you found yours? It can be hard to know, but it’s important to ask. Relationships are important. Time is short. Mistakes are costly. In this talk I’ll discuss some of the mistakes we make in our relationship without ever realizing we’re doing it. Often, these blind spots encourage us to undervalue our relationship. No one wants to settle in order to settle down, but we can also be too harsh and overly critical. Relationship science can help. Better data leads to better decisions. WATCH RECORDING ... View more

A quiet revolution is transforming how we think about the aging brain. As decades of research into the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease is transforming clinical practice, the border between aging and disease is beginning to shift. Millions of persons once labelled as experiencing “normal aging” are either not normal, or they’re at risk of becoming abnormal. This talk, drawn from the presenter’s book The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It explains this revolution and its consequences for an aging America. The focus is the intersecting stories of two seminal events: the discoveries of mild cognitive impairment and biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease. Together, these discoveries have transformed how physicians define Alzheimer’s disease. They promise early diagnosis and treatment and also a strange mix of opportunities and threats to the identity, agency, and privacy of aging Americans. WATCH RECORDING ... View more

Macmillan Learning is delighted to congratulate Jeff Greenberg, co-author of just-published Social Psychology, Third Edition, for receiving this prestigious honor from his peers. The SPSP's Career Contribution Award goes to scholars who make breakthrough contributions (theoretical or empirical) to our understanding of social psychology, personality psychology, or the areas where these fields intersect. The society uses this award to acknowledge exceptional careers that have previously been under-recognized. Learn more about the Career Contribution Award Learn more about Social Psychology, Third Edition ... View more

My college has been working remotely for the last 10 months, and we’re planning on working remotely for the next 10 months, although that may change as conditions warrant. I participate in regular committee and department meetings via Zoom. My EdTech colleagues—one-third of my time is spent there—and I communicate with each other primarily through Slack. We have only two Slack channels: #actualwork and #rantandrave. That pretty much covers what we need to discuss. In late March 2020 as the handful of us in EdTech prepared to help our 500 or so faculty move to remote or asynchronous online teaching, Slack was a lifeline. For colleagues I’m closer to, we meet via Zoom one-on-one every so often. As we plodded through January 2021 and the start of our winter quarter, I realized what I had been missing. I missed casual conversations. I missed people popping their heads into my office to ask if I had a minute to chat about… anything. Students. Teaching. Dogs. Cupcakes. Gossip. I missed chatting with people in the hallway. On campus sidewalks. In the parking lot. I missed my casual acquaintances. To remedy this at my college, I started a “watercooler” movement. Anyone at any time can email all faculty and staff with “watercooler” and a (short!) time limit in the subject line. For example, if it’s 10:55am, I could send out a faculty/staff email with “Watercooler until 11:15am.” In the body of the message is a Zoom link. There is no agenda, and the time is short and finite. We’re just there for a few minutes to chat about whatever topics move us. I’ve hosted a few watercoolers, and to date, three of my colleagues have hosted watercoolers. We’ve had anywhere from five to ten people attend—including the college president. I’ve met some new people, including people who started working at the college after we went remote. And I’ve seen many people that I only used to see in hallways, on sidewalks, in parking lots. After each watercooler session, my mood is much lighter. If I were a much deeper person, I’d say this time with acquaintances feeds my soul. But I’m not that deep. In a recent watercooler session, one my colleagues said she not-long-ago read an article about the importance of weak social ties. She said the crux of the article was that that’s what so many of us are missing with our remote work: our weak ties. And that is how I came to learn about sociologist Mark Granovetter’s paper on the importance of weak ties (Granovetter, 1973). One of my takeaways from the article is that historically, sociology focused on strong ties as the key to functioning networks. Granovetter proposed that weak ties are also important and worthy of research. Others evidently agreed. Google Scholar says that 58,631 articles to date have cited this 1973 paper. Several news outlets at various times during this pandemic year have picked up on this story—that we’re missing connecting with our weak ties. Here’s a sampling. Each article provides its own suggestions for how to tend to our weak ties during the pandemic. BBC (July 2, 2020): “Why your ‘weak-tie’ friendships may mean more than you think” The Harvard Gazette (August 27, 2020): “The value of talking to strangers — and nodding acquaintances” The New York Times (October 11, 2020): “How to connect with the co-workers you’re missing” In your coverage of social psych or stress and coping, ask your students to read one or more of the articles above. In a discussion, ask students if they feel like they’re maintaining their weak ties. If so, how? If not, how might they? Your students aside, how can you foster your weak tie connections?   Reference Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380. ... View more

Humor is a vital part of our lives (even more so now). So, what's the secret recipe that makes something funny? https://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/warren-barsky-mcgraw-humor-theory ... View more

As the pandemic wears on, I’ve been in need of more feel-good stories. Here’s one to add to your coverage of helping behavior in the social psych chapter. Four-year-old Nico was out walking along Ottawa’s Rideau Canal with his mom, his two-year-old brother Santiago and his six-year-old brother Sebastian. Unfortunately, Santiago tossed Nico’s stuffed animal over the railing and onto the frozen canal. Unable to retrieve it, all they could do was revisit it every day, watching as each snowfall buried it deeper. Sebastian, being the community-minded six-year-old that he is, implored his mom to use social media to see if anyone could help. Mom was skeptical, but she took Sebastian’s advice and posted to Twitter. The article author writes, “As hard as it was to believe, a mission to rescue Rudolph was quickly mounted.” I’m not sure why this was hard to believe. At this point in the article, I was ready to board a plane to Ottawa and retrieve the stuffed animal myself. Here’s this little boy who cares enough about this stuffed animal to take it with him on walks, his brother tosses it out of reach, and now all he can do is see it from the railing. Every day. And wait for spring when the ice melts and his stuffed animal floats away. As you might guess, I wasn’t the only one feeling for Nico. Members of the National Capital Commission Skateway team—the group that makes sure the Rideau Canal has skate-able ice in the winter—found the stuffed animal, thawed it out, tidied it up, and returned it to Nico. Group discussion Read “Little boy’s stuffed Bambi was rescued from frozen canal—they didn’t think people would care.” In your groups, review the list of factors that are associated with helping behavior from the social psychology chapter and from lecture. For each factor, identify whether it was present, absent, or unknown.  For each factor that was present, provide evidence from the article. After discussion, bring students back together. Ask each group to report, in turn, one helping factor they identified from the article—a factor that has not been already been identified by an earlier group. As a follow-up assignment/asynchronous discussion, ask students to find another story where a stranger provided help, and, from the article, identify whether the helping factors covered in your textbook and/or lecture were present, absent, or unknown. Again, for each factor that was present, provide evidence from the article. ... View more

The good folks at Google have been working from home since March/April 2020. Their “Supporting Employee Mental Health and Well-being” document has a number of handy tips. It opens with this statement. “We are all learning how to cope with a global crisis. Each day, there is a new challenge that we may encounter. Here are a few things that Google is doing to help our people take care of their mental health during these difficult and uncertain times.” While covering Stress and Coping in your Intro Psych course, consider this discussion topic. Discussion Read Google’s “Supporting Employee Mental Health and Well-being” document. Part A. Identify two suggestions in the document that are supported by research that you read about in your textbook. Quote the relevant passages from your textbook. Part B. Identify at least one coping strategy that you read about in your textbook that is not in Google’s “Supporting Employee Mental Health and Well-being” document. If you were revising this document, write a paragraph that would be an appropriate addition. Alternatively, you could turn this into a group project with the goal of creating a “Supporting [Your Institution’s] Mental Health and Well-being” document that would be distributed to the students and employees of your institution. Your students would be using what they learn in your Intro Psych class in a real-world, impactful way. Divide your students into groups of three to five, and give them these instructions. Group Project Read Google’s “Supporting Employee Mental Health and Well-being” document. The goal of this group project is to create a similar document for [your institutions’] students and employees. While Google’s document has five categories, you may choose to use or not use any or all of these categories. Use what you learned in our Stress and Coping chapter to create your recommendations. Each recommendation needs to be evidence-based. Include the reference to at least one peer-reviewed journal for each recommendation. The last page of your document will be a “Works Cited” page. Once each group has submitted their “Supporting [your institution’s] Mental Health and Well-being” document, a representative from each group will meet to take the best recommendations from each group’s document to create a final set of recommendations and make final edits, as needed. This final document will be distributed institution-wide. ... View more

“People are able to see and recognize patterns that can help them make decisions or form judgments, and a lot of this recognition is outside of conscious awareness.” The Science Behind Gut Feelings https://elemental.medium.com/the-science-behind-gut-feelings-e4ed0be994e9 ... View more

Do your students know what makes them happy? They probably think they do, and much what they think is probably wrong. Professor Gilbert will discuss the science of happiness, and tell you about some findings that will surprise your students – and maybe you as well! WATCH THE RECORDING ... View more

In the aftermath of the US presidential inauguration, I’ve been reading about QAnon with much interest. From the New York Times: Followers of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory, have spent weeks anticipating that Wednesday [1/20/21, inauguration day] would be the “Great Awakening” [also called “The Storm”]— a day, long foretold in QAnon prophecy, when top Democrats would be arrested for running a global sex trafficking ring and President Trump would seize a second term in office. Imagine the QAnon believers as they watched the coverage of the inauguration. From NPR: Former President Donald Trump did not declare martial law in his final minutes in office; nor did he reveal a secret plan to remain in power forever. President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were not sent to Guantánamo Bay. The military did not rise up and arrest Democratic leaders en masse. If you’re looking for a new example of cognitive dissonance, here you go. From CNN: The anti-climax sent QAnon adherents into a frenzy of confusion and disbelief, almost instantly shattering a collective delusion that had been nurtured and amplified by many on the far right. Now, in addition to being scattered to various smaller websites after Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR) cracked down on QAnon-related content, believers risked having their own topsy-turvy world turned upside down, or perhaps right-side up. We see a similar pattern in doomsday cults. For them, on an identified day, the world will end. When that day passes, the doomsday cult members face some significant cognitive dissonance. “I believed that the world was going to end, but it didn’t.” Now, how to resolve that dissonance. One option is to acknowledge that you were wrong. Another option is provided by the doomsday cult leader. Something like, “The Great Being was so impressed with our preparations for the end that the Great Being has moved the date to [some date in the future].” For some followers, they grab hold of that explanation like a lifeline and become even more committed to the group. “Wow! I helped save the world!” The QAnon followers are facing a similar cognitive dissonance challenge. While the world wasn’t supposed to end on 1/20/21, democracy in the U.S. was. But it didn’t. So now what? Some followers are deciding that they were wrong; they were duped. From the Washington Post: A huge chunk of Twitter’s QAnon community has vaporized, seemingly overnight. A pro-Trump message board has rebranded itself, jettisoning the former president’s name from its URL in its move toward a broader message. And other right-wing forums are grappling with internal rebellion and legal war. As reported in the above news stories, a significant number of QAnon followers (can we ever know how many?) are looking for something else to grasp. Some have decided that—like doomsday cults—the “Great Awakening” will still happen. Others seem to believe that Trump is still in charge and is controlling President Joe Biden. I’m especially interested to see where that goes. Will that QAnon faction break off and become staunch supporters of Biden? Other QAnon followers are being courted by neo-Nazi groups. History—and cognitive dissonance research—tell us that the beliefs fostered by QAnon will persist. What form will they take? And how many people will adhere to them? ... View more