Help shape the future of the intro psych course! The APA is looking for instructors to provide feedback to their APA Introductory Psychology Initiative Census (APA IPIC). Take a look at ow.ly/lZGu30nYCVS    ... 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

Because the perception of color is inherent to our experience, it’s difficult to know what someone else’s perception of color is like. People with total color blindness (either monochromacy or achromatopsia) (National Eye Institute, 2015) or color deficiency – can’t know what someone with complete color vision sees. And people with complete color vision can’t know what someone with total color blindness or color deficiency sees. In an article about what it is like to be a woman who is red/green color blind*, Zoe Dubno (2019) tells us about a free app that manipulates color to show us what everyone else is seeing: Color Blind Pal (Android/iOS/Mac). If your students have one of these three types of color blindness, the app will shift the hue of colors to make those colors easier to see. Protanopia/protanomaly (cannot see any red/reduced sensitivity to red) Deuteranopia/deuteranomaly (cannot see any green/reduced sensitivity to green) Tritanopia/trianomaly (cannot see blue/reduced sensitivity to blue) For your non-color blind students who are, say, future software builders, website designers, graphic designers, interior designers or who will ever have a need to create a graph or do a presentation, they should know what almost 10% of their audience (National Eye Institute, 2015) will see. You can give your students this information from the National Eye Institute (2015): Red/green color blindness Protanopia: “Red appears as black. Certain shades of orange, yellow, and green all appear as yellow.” Protanomaly: “Red, orange, and yellow appear greener and colors are not as bright.” Deuteranopia: Red looks brownish-yellow; green look beige. Deuteranomaly (most common): “Yellow and green appear redder and it is difficult to tell violet from blue.” Blue/yellow color blindness Tritanopia (very rare): “Blue appears green and yellow appears violet or light grey.” Trianomaly: “Blue appears greener and it can be difficult to tell yellow and red from pink.” Or your non-color blind students can see the effects of color blindness for themselves in the Color Blind Pal app.  Or your color blind students who are, say, future software builders, website designers, graphic designers, interior designers or who will ever have a need to create a graph or do a presentation, can use the Color Blind Pal app to shift colors into a range they can better see.  Instructions on how to use the Color Blind Pal app are at the end of this blog post. Why is it that a red deficiency results in an inability to distinguish red from green and vice versa, and why is it that a green deficiency results in an inability to distinguish green from red? Follow the link to this image that shows the light wavelengths and how many photons (packets of lightwaves) each cone captures. Notice how much the red and green cones overlap in terms of their sensitivity to the wavelengths of light. For someone who is lacking green sensitivity, for example, their spectrum shifts toward red, making telling the difference between red and green more difficult. Conversely, for someone who is lacking red sensitivity, their spectrum shifts toward green, also making telling the difference between red and green more difficult. Why so much overlap between red and green cones? It looks like red and green cones used to be different alleles of the same gene. And this is still true among New World primates. The continents split 50 million years ago separating what would become New World primates from Old World primates. Around 40 million years ago, in Old World primates what was the green/red gene duplicated, allowing one gene to specialize in creating red cones and the other to specialize in creating green cones. New World primates haven’t had this gene duplication and all remain dichromats (essentially, they’re red/green color blind), except for some females. Since the gene with red/green alleles resides on the X chromosome (and gene for blue cones on chromosome 7), a male New World primate has blue (chromosome 7) and either green or red (he only has one X). A female New World primate has blue (chromosome 7), and, with two Xs, she can have two greens, two reds, or a green and red. In the latter case, she is a trichromat (White, Smith, & Heideman, n.d.). The Ishihara Test After your students have had a chance to explore the Color Blind Pal mobile app, visit a website that displays examples from the Ishihara Test for color blindness, such as this one at colormax.org. Zoom in so that only one test item is displayed at a time. Your students who are not color blind can simulate the different forms of color blindness to see how the number disappears. They can then change the settings in the app so that the app thinks they have, say, deuteranopia, to see how the app changes the colors to make the number more distinctive. Your students who are color blind, using the app set to their form of color blindness may see the number where they hadn’t before.   ******<Start instructions>****** Instructions on how to use the Color Blind Pal mobile app Install the app by downloading it from Google Play (Android) or the App Store (iOS). When it asks, give the app permission to access your camera. If you are not color blind or color deficient: Click on the “i” icon, then click on “Color blindness type.” Choose one of the five “Simulate” options. Start with “Simulate deuteranomaly” (reduced sensitivity to green and the most common form of color blindness), then tap the back arrow. At the top of the screen, you can toggle between “Inspecting Color” which names the color in the middle of the screen and “Filtering Colors.” (Play around with “Inspecting Color” first, if you’d like.) Switch to “Filtering Colors.” Make sure “Shift” is selected at the bottom of the screen. You are now seeing what someone with deuteranomaly sees. Use the app to look at a range of colors, especially green and orange. Compare violet and blue. In the settings, change the “color blindness type” to “Simulate deuteranopia” (green blindness), and tap the back arrow. Look at those same colors again. How does lacking the ability to see any green (deuteranopia) compare to being green-deficient (deuteranomaly)? Change the “color blindness type” again to simulate the other forms of color blindness: protanopia (cannot see red), protanomaly (red-deficiency), tritanopia (cannot see blue). How do colors look different when simulating deuternopia compared to protanopia? If you are color blind or color deficient: Click on the “i” icon, then click on “Color blindness type.” Choose the type of color blindness that is closest to yours: protanopia (red), deuteranopia (green), or tritanopia (blue), then tap the back arrow. If you're not sure which form you have, start with deuteranopia (also covers deuteranomaly, the most common type of color blindness). At the top of the screen, you can toggle between “Inspecting Color” which names the color in the middle of the screen and “Filtering Colors.” (Play around with “Inspecting Color” first, if you’d like.) Switch to “Filtering Colors.” Make sure “Shift” is selected at the bottom of the screen. The app will “shift" hues away from colors that are hard to distinguish toward colors that are easier to distinguish.”   At the bottom of the screen, select “Filter.” Everything will appear gray except for the color you chose on the slider. How do the colors change for you? What looks different now? ******<End instructions>****** *Color blindness vs color deficiency. Technically, the only people who are color blind are those with no color vision at all. Everyone else has different degrees of color deficiency. However, color blindness is in common use to mean any degree of color deficiency, I will use color blindness in this post in that way.   References Dubno, Z. (2019, February 5). Letter of recommendation: Color blind pal. The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-color-blind-pal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss National Eye Institute. (2015). Facts about color blindness. Retrieved February 13, 2019, from https://nei.nih.gov/health/color_blindness/facts_about White, P. J. T., Smith, J., & Heideman, M. (n.d.). The evolution of trichromatic vision in monkeys. Retrieved February 17, 2019, from https://lbc.msu.edu/evo-ed/pages/primates/index.html ... View more

You can buy a good pair of bone conduction headphones for under $150. Some of your students may have seen them or own a set. Here’s a little information to add to your next Intro Psych hearing lecture, or at least some information to hold onto in case a student asks. If you teach Biopsych, you can dig even deeper into this topic – or have your students do the digging. Bone conduction headphones, such as Aftershokz Trekz Air, send vibrations through, well, bone. The headphones speakers are generally positioned against the cheek bone or upper jaw bone right in front of each ear. The cheek bones carry the vibrations through to the temporal bone – the bone that surrounds the cochlea. While the specifics are still under investigation, we know that these vibrations cause the cochlear fluid to move, triggering the cilia that send their messages to the auditory cortex where we hear sound. It could be that the bone vibrations cause the fluid in the cochlea to move due to a change in pressure, the vibrations in the bone put pressure on the walls of the cochlea causing them to compress, or the vibrations in the bone could cause waves in the cerebrospinal fluid in the skull thereby causing waves in the cochlea (Dauman, 2013). Or all three. All of those routes explain how someone with middle ear damage can hear through bone conduction. The vibrations bypass the bones of the middle ear and affect the cochlea directly. Bone conduction hearing devices (previously called bone anchored hearing aids) are for people with issues with their outer or middle ears. These devices can either be surgically implanted with a speaker attached by magnet or just temporarily attached with adhesive (Hearing Link, 2017). The vibrations produced by bone conduction headphones also cause vibrations in the skin and cartilage of the outer ear as well as vibrations in the temporal bone of the skull. Those vibrations cause air to move in the outer ear, triggering the bones of the middle ear to move, and so on, resulting in sound. This may not contribute much to what we hear through bone conduction, but it contributes more if we wear ear plugs with our bone conduction headphones. That brings us to the occlusion effect (Dauman, 2013). While you may not be familiar with the occlusion effect (I wasn’t), everyone with some amount of hearing has experienced it. While talking, plug your ears with your fingers. Your voice will sound up to 20 decibels louder (Ross, 2004).   We hear our own voices through bone conduction. With our outer ears open, the vibrations that come through the bone can vibrate on out through the outer ear. With our outer ears plugged, the vibrations cannot escape and so reverberate back through the middle ear, amplifying our voices. This is one of the reasons some people don’t like (unvented) earmold hearing aids; they completely block the ear canal making our voice sound funny (Ross, 2004). Most earmold hearing aids now come with a vent – an opening that allows the vibrations caused by our voices to escape. Why use bone conduction headphones? There are several advantages to using bone conduction headphones (Banks, 2019). If you are walking, running, or biking on the open road, bone conduction headphones allow you to listen to your tunes without blocking your ear canal. You’ll have a greater chance of hearing that car coming up behind you, but, of course, all of the research on attention tells us that you still may not attend to the sound of the car. Or you may not hear the car at all if the sound of it is masked by whatever you’re listening to through your headphones (May & Walker, 2017). In terms of this sort of safety, bone conduction headphones are likely not worse than any other kind of headphone or speaker (Granados, Hopper, & He, 2018). If you use earmold hearing aids, you can use bone conduction headphones with them. If you are a scuba diver, you can use a bone conduction microphone and headphones to both speak and listen underwater (see for example Logosease). If you have tinnitus, bone conduction headphones can provide auditory stimulation to the cochlea that may reduce tinnitus while allowing you to still have a conversation in, say, a work environment (British Tinnitus Association, n.d.; Schweitzer, 2018), although the research here is scant (Manning, Mermagen, & Scharine, 2017). Can bone conduction headphones produce hearing loss when listening at loud volumes just like regular headphones can? After scouring journals and reading opinions from all corners of the internet, my conclusion, pending further evidence, is a tentative and cautious affirmative; bone conduction headphones can cause hearing loss. Anything that can produce loud sounds, including regular headphones cranked up to a high volume, causes hearing loss by producing tsunamis that damage the cilia in the cochlea. Since bone conduction headphones are also causing waves in the cochlea, it stands to reason that waves caused by bone conduction could also reach tsunami strength. But, then again, maybe bone conduction cannot produce those kind of waves. Some research here would be nice. If you know of any, please let me know!   References Banks, L. (2019). Best bone conduction headphones of 2019: A complete guide. Retrieved February 11, 2019, from https://www.everydayhearing.com/hearing-technology/articles/bone-conduction-headphones/ British Tinnitus Association. (n.d.). Sound therapy (sound enrichment). Retrieved February 11, 2019, from https://www.tinnitus.org.uk/sound-therapy Dauman, R. (2013). Bone conduction : An explanation for this phenomenon comprising complex mechanisms. European Annals of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Diseases, 130(4), 209–213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anorl.2012.11.002 Granados, J., Hopper, M., & He, J. (2018). A usability and safety study of bone-conduction headphones during driving while listening to audiobooks. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 62(1). Hearing Link. (2017). Bone conduction hearing devices. Retrieved February 11, 2019, from https://www.hearinglink.org/your-hearing/implants/bone-conduction-hearing-devices/ Manning, C., Mermagen, T., & Scharine, A. (2017). The effect of sensorineural hearing loss and tinnitus on speech recognition over air and bone conduction military communications headsets. Hearing Research, 349, 67–75. May, K., & Walker, B. N. (2017). The effects of distractor sounds presented through bone conduction headphones on the localization of critical environmental sounds. Applied Ergonomics, 61, 144–158. Ross, M. (2004). Dr. Ross on hearing loss. Retrieved February 11, 2019, from http://www.hearingresearch.org/ross/hearing_loss/the_occlusion_effect.php Schweitzer, G. (2018). Bone conduction headphones for hearing loss and tinnitus. Retrieved February 11, 2019, from https://rewiringtinnitus.com/trekz-titanium-bone-conduction-headphones/ ... View more

If you want an entire country, state, province, territory, or city to stop ingesting certain consumables, you tax them. “Sin taxes” are applied to things like alcohol and cigarettes. The goal is to make these goods so expensive to purchase, people will stop purchasing them. Or, for those who continue to consume them, the tax they pay can go toward the public health coffers. The U.S. federal government, for example, has a tax of about $1.01 on each pack of cigarettes (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, 2017). Each U.S. state/territory can add their own tax on top of that. The national average is $1.79/pack with a low of $.17 (Missouri) and a high of $5.10 (Puerto Rico) (Boonn, 2018). Finally, cities can add their own taxes. New York City, for example, adds a $1.50 tax. If you want to buy a pack of cigarettes in New York City, you’re tax is $1.01 (federal) plus $4.35 (state) plus $1.50 (city) for a total of $6.86 (Mathias, 2017). And, then, of course, is the cost of the cigarettes themselves. Do sin taxes work? Does this added cost reduce consumption of tobacco? Using a list of tobacco taxes in the U.S. (Boonn, 2018) and a list of smoking rates in the U.S. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018), I ran the correlation: -.42. The higher the tax, the lower the smoking rates. Of course, correlation does not mean causation. Do higher taxes cause people to smoke less? Or is it the other way around? Are people in states where people smoke less more likely to vote for higher taxes on cigarettes? Or is there some third variable(s) that affect both the cigarette tax and the smoking rate? It doesn’t answer the question of causation, but the World Health Organization reported on interesting longitudinal data from South Africa (WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic, 2008). When the tax was high, cigarette purchasing was low. From the mid-1980s through the late 1990s, South Africa reduced the tax, and gradually the cigarette purchasing rates climbed. In the late 1990s when they started raising the tax again, cigarette purchasing rates declined again. If “sin taxes” cause us to reduce our purchasing of “sin” products, then operant conditioning offers an explanation why. If a product costs a lot of money to purchase, we’ll be less likely to purchase it – especially if we are not financially well-off. Punishment is defined as anything that reduces a behavior. High prices are, well, punitive. Or at least that’s the idea. For a six tax to be punitive, the amount of additional tax has to be enough for us to actually reduce the behavior, i.e. stop purchasing the product. What that amount is for you may be different than what it is for me. For a 1-pack-a-day smoker in New York City, they’re paying $6.86 in tax alone for that pack of cigarettes. If they make $14.00 an hour, one half hour of work goes toward that cigarette tax. Every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if that smoker quite smoking, or at least reduced how much they smoke. For a different 1-pack-a-day smoker who makes $150 an hour, that $6.86 in tax doesn’t hurt so much. They can make that amount of money in less than 3 minutes. Every day. This is the discussion in Seattle right now around a year-old sugary drink tax. In the city, each sugary drink is assessed a $.0175 per ounce tax. That 16 ounce Coke you are buying with your lunch is now $0.28 more. “The city predicted the tax would cut soda consumption by 40 percent. But through the first nine months, the tax is generating revenues at a rate 52 percent higher than predicted — suggesting it’s possible it may be having no effect on Seattleites’ soda appetites whatsoever.” One possibility is that most of the city residents are making enough money that that $0.28 isn’t even felt (Westneat, 2018).  Like the rest of the city, that $0.28 is not going to stand between me and my Coke.* Here’s a quick classroom demonstration. Ask students to think about their favorite beverage. How much more would their drink have to cost for them to reduce how much they buy? Start at $0.25 and raise it by $0.10, then another $0.10, and so on. Ask students to raise their hands when the additional cost hits the point when they buy less of it and to keep their hands up until everyone has their hands in the air (or use clickers – “vote A when we hit your no-go tax.”) Reiterate that punishment is only punishment if it reduces the behavior. What that punishment point is differs by person. The other thing that punishment does is make us good at avoiding punishment. You shouldn’t be surprised to hear that there is a thriving black market for cigarettes in New York City. Of these smuggled packs of cigarettes, 30.9% have no state stamp; 44.7% carry a Virginia stamp where the state tax is $0.30 per pack, well-below the New York State/New York City combined tax of $5.85 (Mathias, 2017). If the tax is too high, people will find ways to not pay it. Conclude this part of your lecture by emphasizing the importance of understanding the principles of operant conditioning. From their pets to their dating partners/spouses to their children to the population of a city, state/province/territory, or country, operant conditioning is at work.   *Actually, I haven’t had a full-sugar Coke in years, but if they similarly taxed Diet Coke or Coke Zero, I’d have no problem paying that $0.28. Don’t tell the Seattle City Council.   References Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. (2017). Federal excise tax increase and related provisions. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.ttb.gov/main_pages/schip-summary.shtml Boonn, A. (2018). State cigarette excise tax rates and rankings. Washington, D.C. Retrieved from https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/assets/factsheets/0097.pdf Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2018). Map of cigarette use among adults. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.cdc.gov/statesystem/cigaretteuseadult.html Mathias, C. (2017). Inside New York City’s dangerous, multimillion-dollar cigarette black market. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/03/cigarette-smuggling-new-york-_n_5041823.html Westneat, D. (2018). The city’s new soda tax is usurious — and also too low. Retrieved February 3, 2019, from https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/story-of-seattle-the-citys-new-soda-tax-is-usurious-and-also-too-low/ WHO report on the global tobacco epidemic. (2008). Geneva, Switzerland. ... View more

Shout out to the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Facebook group for sharing their favorite tools for helping students study the brain. Printable black and white images of the brain from Clipart Library (shared by Achu John) Images include the brain, the eye, and the neuron. Use these images as diagrams on your next exam, write on them during your lecture using a document camera, and print them for students to take notes on. This webpage also includes a half-court basketball drawing, an empty times table chart, and a two-circle Venn diagram. I’m not entirely sure how you can use these for teaching brain-related things, but you’ll have them if you need them. 3D Brain app for iOS, Android, and web (web version needs Adobe Flash) was produced by the DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (shared by Kat West) From the dropdown menu, select the brain area of interest, such as Broca’s area. The image of the brain turns gray with Broca’s area highlighted in purple. A paragraph of text tells us what Broca’s area does and another paragraph gives us a case study. We get some information about associated functions, cognitive disorders, and what we see when Broca’s area is damaged. Three research reviews round out the text. The directional controls in the lower right allow you to rotate the brain image. Use this website during your lecture to show where the brain areas in a three-dimensional space. Students can use it as a study tool. Be aware that the functions associated with each brain area in the 3D Brain likely paints a more complicated picture of how the brain works than your Intro Psych textbook. For example, the amygdala, the 3D Brain tells us, is associated with “fear-processing, emotion processing, learning, fight-or-flight response, and reward-processing,” which is a bit more than the strong emotions-like-anger-and-fear that a lot of Intro Psych textbooks report. Pocket Brain, Brain Anatomy, and Brain and Nervous Anatomy Atlas ($9.99) all for iOS (shared by Susie Veccio); My Brain Anatomy and Brain Tutor 3D Some of these are at a level appropriate for Intro Psych. Others may be more appropriate for a neuroscience course. Take a look at each of them yourself before recommending to your students. Neuroscientifically Challenged videos (shared by Susanne Biehl) "These 2-Minute Neuroscience videos will help you learn the basics of neuroscience in short, easy-to-understand clips." Bonus resources BrainFacts.org (a resource by the Society for Neuroscience) has a webpage for educators. The target audience is K-12, but many of the resources for secondary ed teachers would also work for higher ed. The website includes a “Find a Neuroscientist” database. “Neuroscientists around the world are eager to help you educate about the brain. Our database has scientists in more than 40 countries. Connect with a scientist in your community today.” Enter your location, and a list of neuroscientists will come up. How to pick one and how they can help you is not clear, but there you go. The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons by science writer Sam Kean This book is a must-read for anyone teaching neuroscience. Each chapter focuses on a different part of the brain. We get the back story on the research, a report on current research findings, and a handful of case studies. Take notes as you read; your neuroscience lectures will be much more compelling. (Read my 2015 book review.) Christina Ragan's Teaching Resources for Biological Psychology and Neuroscience Facebook Group  This is "a a centralized location to share activities, links, readings, videos, etc. on topics related to biology, psychology, and neuroscience." If you're looking for a community for sharing such resources, this is a good one. What are your favorite resources for teaching the brain? ... View more

Here’s some information the business majors taking your Intro Psych class should be thinking about. During the social psychology chapter, pose this question to your students: Is it good for employees to know how much money their managers and their coworkers are making? Why? Give students a couple minutes to think about this. If you’d like, let students discuss with one or two people around them. If you have an audience response system, ask each question separately. “Is it good for employees to know how much money their managers are making?” Ask volunteers to share their reasoning. Next, ask “Is it good for employees to know how much their coworkers are making?” Again, ask volunteers to share their reasoning. Zoë Cullen (Harvard Business School) and Ricardo Perez-Truglia (UCLA) wondered the same thing. You’re welcome to read the working paper or a summary written by the authors for the Harvard Business Review. Managers (vertical inequality) Cullen and Perez-Truglia (Cullen & Perez-Truglia, 2018) asked a couple thousand employees of “a large commercial bank in Asia” to guess how much their manager made. They thought that their managers made about 14% less than they actually did. The researchers then randomly assigned the employees to either learn how much their managers actually made or to remain in the dark. With the assistance of the bank, researchers “gathered daily timestamp, email, and sales data for the year following our survey.” Learning that their managers made more money than they thought resulted in employees working more hours, sending more email messages, and selling more than those who did not learn how much their managers actually made. In fact, the more off employees were in their estimates, the more work they did. And the closer the manager was on the corporate ladder to the employee, the more pronounced the effect. “[A]fter realizing that these managers get paid more, employees became more optimistic about the salaries they will earn themselves five years in the future.”  Coworkers (horizontal inequality) Cullen and Perez-Truglia (Cullen & Perez-Truglia, 2018) asked those same research participants to guess the salaries of “the other employees with the same position and title, from the same unit.” While the participants were closer in accuracy with their guesses than they were with managers, most still underestimated how much their coworkers were making. Again, participants were randomly assigned to learn how much their coworkers actually made or to remain in the dark. Using the same “daily timestamp, email, and sales data for the year following our survey,” researchers found employees worked less than their in-the-dark counterparts. And they didn’t work just a little bit less. “ Finding out that peers earn on average 10% more than initially thought caused employees to spend 9.4% fewer hours in the office, send 4.3% fewer emails, and sell 7.3% less.” This is a beautiful – if unfortunate – example of relative deprivation. Relative deprivation is “the perception by an individual that the amount of a desired resource (e.g., money, social status) he or she has is less than some comparison standard. This standard can be the amount that was expected or the amount possessed by others with whom the person compares himself or herself” (American Psychological Association, n.d.) When we experience relative deprivation, we feel worse. And when that relative deprivation is experienced in a work setting, that feeling worse translates into working less. Discussion Ask your students to imagine that they are employers. How might they handle salary information? Would they be transparent, letting everyone know how much everyone is paid? Would they release average salaries by position type rather than attach names to salaries? And should different people who hold the same position be paid different salaries? Cullen and Perez-Truglia (Cullen & Perez-Truglia, 2018) offer a couple suggestions. “[K]eep salaries compressed among employees in the same position, but offer them large raises when they get promoted to a higher position.” “[T]ransparency about average pay for a position, without disclosing individual salaries.”   The researchers conclude their Harvard Business Review article with this advice.   We encourage you to start experimenting with transparency at your company.  The first step is to figure out what your employees want. You can find out through anonymous surveys. Just mention some alternatives that you consider viable, and let them voice their preferences. For instance, do your employees feel informed about their salaries five years down the road? Would they want to find out the average pay two or three promotions ahead? Once you look at the survey results, you can decide what information to disclose and how. According to our findings, signals about the enticing paychecks waiting five years in the future is the push they need to be at their best.   References American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Relative deprivation. Retrieved December 26, 2018, from https://dictionary.apa.org/relative-deprivation Cullen, Z., & Perez-Truglia, R. (2018). The motivating (and demotivating) effects of learning others’ salaries. Retrieved December 27, 2018, from https://hbr.org/2018/10/the-motivating-and-demotivating-effects-of-learning-others-salaries ... View more

In Intro Psych, during coverage of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in the therapy chapter, give your students this one-page summary provided by Division 12 of the American Psychological Association: Society of Clinical Psychology. Walk your students through some of the highlights. Next, share with your students this Tumblr post as it appeared on Fail Blog. Clearly the client had been seeing this therapist for some time. The client knew the basics of CBT – CBT is about changing how one thinks. The client had had some practice in doing this, but during this particular session, the client was not using what he’d learned. The therapist had very likely seen this behavior from the client before and had been thinking about ways to call the client’s attention to his negative thinking without interrupting the client’s train of thought. At the therapy session described in the Tumblr post, the therapist unveiled his new CBT tool: a Nerf gun. For the rest of the therapy session, every time the client voiced “unhelpful ways of thinking,” his therapist shot him with a Nerf gun. The client stopped, thought about what he said, and revised it. Saying “what a stupid issue, I’m an idiot” was revised to this issue is “frustrating me and I don’t want it to be a problem I’m having.” If you’d like to expand this coverage, you can add information about attribution. Making global (vs. specific), stable (vs. unstable), and internal (vs. external) attributions about negative events is associated with depression. For example, after a relationships ends, a person may make the following attributions. Global: “I can’t do anything right.” Stable: “I’ll never have a successful relationship.” Internal: “I’m not good enough to have a successful relationship.” In CBT, the client is encouraged to make different attributions, attributions that are specific (vs. global), unstable (vs. stable), and external (vs. internal). Specific: “This relationship wasn’t good.” Unstable: “While this relationship didn’t work out, the next one could.” External: “It takes two people to have a relationship. My boyfriend bears some responsibility.” Interestingly, the reverse is true for positive events. Making specific, unstable, and external attributions for positive events is associated with depression. People who are not depressed are more likely to make global, stable, and internal attributions for positive events. Class demonstration If you’ve been waiting all term for an opportunity to peg your students with Nerf balls, here’s the demonstration for you. Ask your students to imagine that they have received a poor grade on an exam. Ask student volunteers to give a global attribution for the failing grade. Hit them with a Nerf ball (aim low, you don’t want anyone to lose an eye!), and then ask for a specific attribution instead. After students have given several global attributions, ask for stable attributions – and for those to be changed to unstable attributions. Lastly, ask for internal attributions – and for those to be changed to external attributions. ... View more

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

At the end of each term, I ask my Intro Psych students for their top ten list of important concepts they learned in the course. Last fall, interestingly, none of my students put parenting styles in their top ten lists. This term, a quarter of my students did. The only difference between those classes is that this term I asked my students to read an Atlantic article on distracted parenting (Christakis, 2018). In our coverage of development I asked students, after they had read the article, whether they thought this is a new “parenting style” or if it fits one of the existing four: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, or neglectful. (Most students called it neglectful, but many weren’t quite ready to go all the way there and called it a “new branch” or a “type” of neglectful parenting.) The article makes for an excellent discussion starter for small groups after you’ve covered parenting styles in class. The discussion of the impact distracted parenting has on children will be meaningful to students since you would have just covered child development. Later when you cover operant conditioning – if you haven’t already done so – you can refer back to this section of the article. Young children will do a lot to get a distracted adult’s attention, and if we don’t change our behavior, they will attempt to do it for us; we can expect to see a lot more tantrums as today’s toddlers age into school. But eventually, children may give up (Christakis, 2018) If the adult drops the phone and attends to the child’s tantrum, the child’s tantrum behavior has been positively reinforced by getting attention, and the adult’s dropping-the-phone behavior has been negatively reinforced by stopping the tantrum. If the adult’s phone is more attention-grabbing than the child’s tantrum, then the adult will ignore the child. The result? Extinction. The child will no longer throw tantrums – or, perhaps, any other behavior that is a plea for adult attention. The author of the article cites two research studies. If you’d like to challenge your students’ research skills, ask them to find those studies. The study that took place in Philadelphia is a pretty easy find because the article’s author gives us the names of the researchers. The Boston research article is a little more challenging because we don’t have clues to the citation. I don’t want to give the reference here because it would make it too easy for your Googling students to find. I can give you a hint, however: it was published in 2014 in a highly-respected peer-reviewed journal. And, if you email me (sfrantz@highline.edu), I would be happy to send you either or both references – as long as I don’t think you’re a student. If you’d like to extend this activity, ask students to assess how well the article’s author did at describing those studies. Did the author hit the important high points? Was there other information in the research articles that would be important for a reader of The Atlantic to know? Reference Christakis, E. (2018). The dangers of distracted parenting. Retrieved August 29, 2018, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/the-dangers-of-distracted-parenting/561752/ ... View more

There are a lot of social psychological concepts that can help explain road rage. This Seattle Times article (Doughton, 2018) beautifully identifies a number of these concepts. Students will see how social psychology tells us something about our everyday lives. And, hopefully, students will remember this the next time they find themselves overly angry at the behavior of strangers. You can use the article in any number of ways. Pull out the examples to frame your social psychology lecture After students read the chapter, but before you cover the concepts in class, ask students, as a homework assignment, to identify the social psychological concepts Before you cover these concepts, ask students to read the article, then, in small groups, identify the social psychological concepts After your social psychology lecture, ask students to read the article, and then in small groups, identify the social psychological concepts If your students are reading the article and identifying the concepts, ask students to define the concepts they find in their own words, quote sections of the article that illustrate each of those concepts, and, finally, explain how the quotes they found illustrate each of the concepts students have identified. To make it easier, give students these concepts to find in the article: Deindividuation Fundamental attribution error Self-serving bias Outgroup homogeneity bias If you’d like students to reflect on previous content they’ve learned about in their Intro Psych course, ask them to identify examples of these concepts in the article: Sympathetic nervous system arousal Observational learning Long-term effects of stress References Doughton, S. (2018, November 2). How to keep your head from exploding in Seattle traffic. Seattle Times. Retrieved from https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/how-to-keep-your-head-from-exploding-in-seattle-traffic ... View more

Do you cover survey research in your Intro Psych course? Given the prevalence of bad surveys, I’m starting to think I should spend more time on it. For a seemingly unlimited supply of bad survey questions, check out the @BadSurveyQ Twitter account. (Thank you to Rachel Soicher at Oregon State University for directing me to this.) Point out to students that not all surveys are written by researchers who have been trained to conduct surveys. In fact, some survey questions are designed to persuade, not to actually gather data. Other survey questions are written by people with good intentions who may not have thought them all the way through. Can you students spot the difference? More importantly, can your students fix the problems? @KenFernandezPHD shared this slanted poll question. In small groups, ask students to take a crack at rewriting this question in neutral language. Do you believe the corrupt leadership of the FBI and DOJ [Department of Justice] now realize President Trump means to end their efforts to subvert his presidency? Yes No @magnatom found another slanted poll question. How would your students fix this one? Do you think the Government will ever seriously look into proven, practical and effective methods to lower vehicle emissions instead of resorting to raising yet more cash from drivers? Yes No No idea @t_mabon found this limited option question. Can students identify the problem? And then fix it? How do you read your books? Papers e-reader/tablet I don’t read Audio books @sachinsomaiya found a question that left the interpretation of the rating scale up to the reader. How do your students interpret this? How would they make it better? What priority would you assign to the candidate for this program? Choose a number between 1 to 10 for the person. @BadSurveyQ wonders about the “other” option in this question. Other what? What would your students do with this “other” option to fix the question? Which of the following have you done in the last 2 years? Rented a house Rented an apartment Rented a car Bought a house Bought an apartment Bought a car Other None of the above @t_mabon shared a poll question that had responses only a company could love. What additional options would your students add? Which of the following statements do you agree with? SELECT ALL THAT APPLY Uber is a company I’m proud to say I use Uber is a brand/service for me Uber sends me relevant communications And one last question from @BadSurveyQ, another question that only a company could love. Please select three other statements that according to you also apply to a Tassimo machine [coffee maker]. Freedom Togetherness Power Entertaining Liberating Fun Open-minded Now, with this blog post completed, I’m going to have a long over-due chat with my coffee maker. If it’s not entertaining and open-minded, it’s out of here. ... View more

This week I interrupt our weekly focus on psychology’s big ideas and new findings to update three prior essays.   Loss aversion in sports. A recent essay described how, in sports (as in other realms of life), our fear of losing can rob us of chances to win: In baseball, a mountain of data shows that runners on first base will rarely take off running on a fly ball that has any chance of being caught. But their aversion to being thrown out leads to fewer runs and wins. And in  basketball, teams trailing by 2 points at a game’s end typically prefer a 2-point shot attempt, hoping to avert a loss and send the game into overtime (where half the time they will lose), over a 3-point attempt for victory—even in situations where the odds favor the latter. New Cornell/University of Chicago studies of “myopic loss aversion” confirm this irrational preference for loss-averting 2-point shots at the end of National Basketball Association games. Moreover, those same studies  extend the phenomenon to National Football League games, where teams prefer to kick a tying extra point in situations where a 2-point conversion makes a win more likely (as when down by two points late in the third quarter—see also here). Caution often thwarts triumph. Gratitude gratifies. An essay last spring testified to the positive power of expressing gratitude, which increases well-being and prosociality. In new experiments, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley found that people who wrote gratitude letters “significantly underestimated how surprised recipients would be about why expressers were grateful, overestimated how awkward recipients would feel, and underestimated how positive recipients would feel.”   Our unexpected personal thank you notes are more heartwarming for their recipients than we appreciate. (Is there someone whose support or example has impacted your life, who would be gratified to know that?)   The net effect. A May 2016 essay discussed research on how, in the smartphone age, “compulsive technology use not only drains time from eyeball-to-eyeball conversation but also predicts poorer course performance.” Since then, my friend (and co-author on the new Social Psychology, 13 th Edition) Jean Twenge has enriched the public understanding of social media effects in her new book, iGen, and in associated media appearances. (For an excellent synopsis, see her Atlantic article.) As she documents, the adoption of smartphones is echoed by increases in teen loneliness, depression, and suicide, and by decreases in sleep and face-to-face interactions (though also in less drinking, sex, and car accidents). Jean also continues to mine data, such as from an annual survey of American teens in a new Emotion study with Gabrielle Martin and Keith Campbell. They reconfirmed that a dip in adolescent well-being has precisely coincided with an increase in screen time (on social media, the Internet, texting, and gaming). Moreover, across individuals, more than 10 screen-time hours per week predicts less teen happiness.   Ergo, a task for teachers is to inform students about these trends and invite discussion about how students might apply them in their own peer culture. In a recent APS Observer essay, I suggested this might also be a good class activity: Invite students to guess how often they check their phone each day, and how many minutes they average on it. Have them download a free screen-time tracker app, such as Moment for the iPhone or QualityTime for the Android. Have them add up their actual total screen time for the prior week and divide by 7 to compute their daily average. Then ask them, “Did you underestimate your actual smartphone use? The results may surprise them. In two recent studies, university students greatly underestimated their frequency of phone checking and time on screen. As Steven Pinker has noted, “The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life.” ... View more

Do you cover transgender and sexual orientation issues in your psychology courses? Before or after your coverage, ask students where incarcerated transgender people should be housed. Should they be housed based on the appearance of their physical body or based on their outward gendered appearance? In other words, if someone was born male, identifies and dresses as female, is convicted of a crime, and sentenced to time in prison, should the person be sent to a women’s prison or to a men’s prison? States determine where an inmate should be housed based on genitalia (Routh et al., 2017). That means that transgender women who have not had sex reassignment surgery are housed in men’s prisons. Have students listen to the 35-minute Episode 18 of the Ear Hustle podcast, broadcasting from San Quentin State Prison. (There is a little salty language and a lot of frank discussion; the LGBT part of the episode runs about 27 minutes.) Questions for students to consider as they listen to the podcast. After listening, students can discuss their responses in an online class discussion board, in small groups during class, or as an entire class: How many out gay men are there at San Quentin? What reasons do the prisoners give for that number? How many transgender women are there at San Quentin? Who is Lady J? Write a short biography for Lady J. What is your reaction to Lady J’s story? How have attitudes toward transgender women in prison changed since the 1980s?   Who is Mike? Write a short biography for Mike. What is your reaction to Mike’s story? Compare attitudes toward transgender women and gay men in your community with the attitudes in San Quentin. What is your reaction to this podcast episode? As of 2015, nine U.S. states provided sex reassignment surgery for state prisoners, including California. Most states provide counseling, some states will start hormone treatments whereas others will only maintain hormone treatment if the inmate has started prior to incarceration (Routh et al., 2017). Investigate what policies are in place for your state or province.   Reference Routh, D., Abess, G., Makin, D., Stohr, M. K., Hemmens, C., & Yoo, J. (2017). Transgender inmates in prisons: A review of applicable statutes and policies. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 61(6), 645–666. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X15603745 ... View more

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