This extinction illusion (Hermann grid variation) has been making the rounds on social media courtesy of a Facebook post by psychological scientist Akiyoshi Kitaoka. There are 12 black dots in this grid. Most people cannot see them all at once. The illusion itself first made an appearance in a 2000 journal article by Ninio & Stevens. Check out their paper for other illusions. The larger lesson for your students: Our senses, including vision, allow our brains to create a representation of the world around us. Our senses do not allow our brains to generate a perfect replication of the world. For students who want to know why the illusion works, well, that’s a little more challenging. The short answer is that our retinas are hard-wired to send the clearest, sharpest signals to the brain. Receptor cells that get the strongest signal block out the weaker signals. Those dots in the periphery get blocked by the grey that surround them thanks to the sparser rods in the periphery. For the longer answer, read up on lateral inhibition. Wikipedia provides a nice summary. (Yes, lateral inhibition is also used to explain Mach bands.) If you want to wade into this even deeper with your students, Wesley Jordan (St. Mary’s College of Maryland) has created a class activity that should help students understand lateral inhibition.   References Ninio, J. & Stevens, K.A. (2000). Variations on the Hermann grid: An extinction illusion. Perception, 29, 1209-1217. ... View more

Years ago, as a young instructor, I didn’t have the tools to help my struggling students who came to my office for studying advice. I had a clear idea of what “studying” was since I had done it for so long, but I don’t know if it’s that I couldn’t put words to what I did to study or if I assumed that everyone did the same thing when “studying,” and that if that didn’t work, I didn’t know what would. In any case, over time, I got better at my advice – test yourself, space out your studying, for example. One term I had a student who earned a perfect score on an exam. Students in the class knew somebody did, and they asked who it was. I said I couldn’t reveal the person’s name, but that person can if so desired. My perfect-score student immediately said, “I did! And I’m proud of it.” The other students began peppering her with some version of “How did you do it!” She explained that she spent time every day on the class. She read the textbook, took notes, merged her textbook notes with her class notes, thought of examples, tested herself over what she was learning. Students started exclaiming, “Oh! I don’t want to do all of that!” Her response? “Then you don’t get an A.” Learning is hard work. There’s no way around it. For students who are willing and able to put in the hard work, I want them to use effective, research-based study techniques. Unfortunately, students may not know what those research-based study techniques are. Some of the techniques students use may be a complete waste of time. Gurung, Weidert, and Jeske (2010) asked 120 students to complete a questionnaire on 35 different study behaviors. The behaviors that correlated positively with the students’ final exam scores: “attended every class,” “answered every question in the study guide,” “used practice exams to study,” and “was able to explain a problem or phenomenon using the material.” Behaviors that correlated negatively with exam scores: “after class, I looked over my notes to check for and fill in missing information,” “highlighted the most important information in each chapter to review later,” “reviewed the chapter after the lecture on that topic,” “asked… a classmate/friend to explain material I didn’t understand,” and “asked the professor or TAs for additional materials.” Interestingly, when they looked at just the top half of exam performers, only one correlation remained. Those who reported highlighting as a study strategy scored lower than those who did not. Highlighting is easy to do – it’s too easy to do. It doesn’t require deep processing; it’s a very shallow process. But at the end, with words highlighted, it’s easy to fool oneself into thinking studying was accomplished. Highlighting is really just coloring – and there are reasons coloring is relaxing: it takes little to no cognitive effort. Now, how about some advice on how to study? Yana Weinstein (UMass Lowell) and Megan Smith (Rhode Island College) of the LearningScientists.org blog have created a wonderful set of posters (slides and sticker templates) to help students learn how to study better. The strategies: spaced practice, retrieval practice, elaboration, interleaving, concrete examples, and dual coding. Side note: I love the use of the very specific word practice instead of the fuzzier word study. Elliott Hammer (2016) reports that “I’m also trying as of late to drop the word ‘study’ from my vocabulary in favor of ‘practice. It’s difficult to get students to be more active in their approach, and I want them to get beyond simply trying to read and call that studying. I don’t have data showing that the switch is working, but it feels more genuine.” To get your students to dive into these learning strategies, after covering the memory chapter, ask students to explain why each strategy is effective based on the concepts and research covered in their reading. This makes a nice out-of-class assignment, but it would also work well done in class with small groups. Give each small group the set of posters to explain the effectiveness of each. After discussion wanes, ask a group to report out on one of the posters; give other groups an opportunity to add to the conversation. Move onto another group, and ask them to report out on a different poster. Continue until all of the posters have been covered. If you use a classroom response system, ask students if they currently use the study strategy and whether they plan to use it in the future. Or you could do a jigsaw classroom. Divide the class into 6 groups of at least 6 members each (or 12 groups of at least 6 members or some other multiple of 6, depending on your class size) and give each group a different poster. (For smaller classes, use multiples of 3 and give each group 2 posters). After each group identifies why the strategy is effective (using the concepts learned in the memory chapter), break apart the groups so that at least one person from each group now forms a new group. Ask each new group member to share the strategy on their poster and explain why the strategy is effective. Bonus: Use the Gurung, et.al. (2010) study as examples when you cover correlations in the research methods chapter. Or use it here in the memory chapter to reinforce correlations. And then ask students which learning strategy is being used in the practice of learning correlations.   References Gurung, R. A., Weidert, J., & Jeske, A. (2010). Focusing on how students study. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 10(1), 28-35. Hammer, E. (2016, July 31). I’m a member of STP and this is how I teach. Retrieved from http://teachpsych.org/page-1703896/4186852 ... View more

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

What makes synesthesia such a powerful lecture topic in the Intro Psych sensation and perception chapter is that it’s a beautiful illustration of how our experience is merely a representation, and just one representation, of the world around us. The neuroscientist David Eagleman provides a nice introduction to synesthesia in this two and a half minute video. Video Link : 1751 Years ago in class, after I concluded my lecture on synesthesia, a young woman in the back of the room raised her hand. She said she didn’t know her experience of the world was different from everyone else’s until a friend of hers took my class a year earlier. She said a group of them were standing around when he started talking about this cool thing called synesthesia that he learned about that day in his Intro Psych course. He explained that the most common form is seeing sounds where sounds produce color, like a filter has been applied to vision. My current student said to her friends, “Doesn’t everybody experience that?” They all stopped and looked at her. At the age of 18, she learned that she was a synesthete. I made the same error once in class. After talking about synesthesia, I said it’s like when you’re drifting off to sleep and a sudden noise causes a black and white pattern to flash in your vision – sound produces a visual sensation. My students looked at me blankly. Apparently I was the only one with such an experience. My visual experience used to happen pretty regularly, probably a few times a week, but now it’s a rare occurrence, probably once every few months. In any case, I learned that it’s non-existent in many, at least amongst my students that term. I suppose this assumption is a kind of extension of the false consensus effect. We not only assume that others share our beliefs and attitudes, but that others share our sensory experiences. There is research evidence that suggests we are all born synesthetes (see for example Wagner and Dobkins, 2011), and as we mature through infancy and childhood our senses begin to specialize, much like how infants can produce sounds used in all languages only to become specialists in their native language or languages as they develop.   Exploring vision in non-human animals helps students appreciate that their own sensory experiences may be very different from others. For example, dogs have two kinds of cones in their retinas; they detect yellow and blue. That may make them roughly equivalent to humans who have red-green color blindness (Wolchover, 2012). And birds? They have four kinds of cones, the fourth allows them to see ultraviolet light. It’s been posited that the ability to see UV light allows some songbirds to better see each other as their plumage glows with UV light and that raptors can better track prey that leave a urine trail that also glows with UV light. There’s reason to believe that the jury is still out on both of those hypotheses (see for example, Lind, et.al., 2013). Both are given though in this rapid-fire 4-minute SciShow on what birds see. Video Link : 1752 And what about infrared light? While the human eye can’t see it, our digital cameras can. Turn on your cellphone camera and direct it at the end of your TV remote, the end you point toward your TV. Press and hold the "on" button on your remote. You’ll see the light through your phone’s camera even though your naked eye can't see it. This is also the easiest way to determine whether you need to change the batteries in your remote or whether it's just your dog standing in front of the TV’s receiver. For a short in-class next-day assignment – or same-day assignment, if your students have in-class internet access – or for an online discussion board assignment, invite students to research other individual differences in human sensation or differences in sensory experiences between humans and other animals. In class, students can share in small groups, and then invite volunteers to share the most interesting things they found. Ask students to identify the site where they found the information and why they believe the site is a reputable source.   References Lind, O., Mitkus, M., Olsson, P., & Kelber, A. (2013). Ultraviolet sensitivity and colour vision in raptor foraging. Journal of Experimental Biology, 216(19), 3764-3764. doi:10.1242/jeb.096123 Wagner, K., & Dobkins, K. R. (2011). Synaesthetic associations decrease during infancy. Psychological Science, 22(8), 1067-1072. doi:10.1177/0956797611416250 Wolchover, N. (2012, June 26). How do dogs see the world? Retrieved from http://www.livescience.com/34029-dog-color-vision.html ... View more

Prosopagnosia – face blindness – used to be thought a rare condition caused only by head trauma. We now know that is not that rare – 2% in the U.S., perhaps (Radden Keefe, 2016) – and that the cause can also be genetic. It also used to be thought that you were either normal or had prosopagnosia. We now know that facial recognition falls on a spectrum. If there is an end of the spectrum where faces are not recognized, it stands to reason that there is another end of the spectrum where faces are easily recognized. And there is research to back up that reasoning. They are called super-recognizers. For your students who are 18+, invite them to take the Cambridge Face Memory Test.  “The average score on this test is around 80% correct responses for adult participants.” The page gives 60% as the cut-off for potential face blindness. I came in at 68%. I should add that this test uses only Caucasian males.  Those of you familiar with the other-race effect may wonder about that. And you are right to wonder. They created a Chinese version and compared performance of participants of European descent and participants of Asian descent on both the Chinese version and the European version. As predicted by the other-race effect, participants of Asian descent did well on the Chinese version (average of 85% correct) but less well on the European version (average of 73% correct). Participants of European descent did well on the European version (76%), but less well on the Chinese version (average of 66%) (McKone, et.al., 2012). Developmental psychologists may be wondering how kids perform. A separate study with five- to twelve-year-olds found that kids develop better facial memory as they age. For example, five-year-olds got 66% correct, 8-year-olds got 76% correct, and 12-year-olds got 85% correct (Croydon, et.al., 2014).  While we’re in the middle of this topic, I might as well throw in how good crows are at recognizing human faces (see this article for more information). Don’t ever tick off a crow. What about those super-recognizers, though? How do they perform? Russell, Duchaine, and Nakayama (2009) found four people who were likely candidates for super-recognizer status. They tested them using the Cambridge Face Memory Test. Three of them earned perfect scores; one person missed one. And what are super-recognizers looking at when they look at a face? The eyes? Nope. The nose. It’s unlikely that that’s because the nose has some sort of special significance. It’s more likely that it’s because the nose is in the center of the face, allowing the super-recognizer to take in the whole face (Bobak & Bate, 2016). The forensically-minded may be wondering if the power of super-recognizers could be harnessed to fight crime. Yes, yes it can. New Scotland Yard created the Super-Recogniser Unit comprised of seven (as of August, 2016) police officers who are, well, super-recognizers. What do they do? Most commonly they look at closed circuit television (CCTV) video of crime suspects, and they look at photos of people who have been arrested. They are looking for a match. “It is not uncommon for a super-recognizer, out on the town with friends, to bolt off after spotting someone with an outstanding warrant.” One officer, James Rabbett, “since joining the team full time, six months ago… has made nearly six hundred identifications.” Yeah, but can’t computer recognition software do the same thing? Following riots in London, computers pegged one rioter. How did a super-recognizer do? He identified 190. Are they sometimes wrong? Yep. About 13% of the time. Their identifications alone are not enough to convict, though. Instead their identifications “help direct the investigation” (Radden Keefe, 2016). After sharing this information with students, ask students where else the power of super-recognizers could be put to good use. If students need a hint, point out that looking at ID and looking then looking at someone’s face requires some facial recognition power. Shout out to Ruth Frickle (Highline College) for posting the Radden Keefe New Yorker article to the STP Facebook page, an act that sent me down this research rabbit hole. References Bobak, A. K., & Bate, S. (2016, February 2). Superior face recognition: A very special super power. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superior-face-recognition-a-very-special-super-power Croydon, A., Pimperton, H., Ewing, L., Duchaine, B. C., & Pellicano, E. (2014). The Cambridge Face Memory Test for Children (CFMT-C): A new tool for measuring face recognition skills in childhood. Neuropsychologia, 62, 60-67. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.07.008 McKone, E., Stokes, S., Liu, J., Cohan, S., Fiorentini, C., Pidcock, M., . . . Pelleg, M. (2012). A robust method of measuring other-race and other-ethnicity effects: The Cambridge Face Memory Test format. PLoS ONE, 7(10). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047956 Radden Keefe, P. (2016, August 15). The detectives who never forget a face. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/londons-super-recognizer-police-force Russell, R., Duchaine, B., & Nakayama, K. (2009). Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16(2), 252-257. doi:10.3758/pbr.16.2.252 ... View more

Did you ever wish you had access to a searchable database of twin correlations and trait heritability statistics? If not, once you see this, you will wonder why you hadn’t been looking for this kind of resource. Shout out to David Myers (Hope College) for pointing me toward MaTCH. Let’s take height as an example. From the first drop-down menu, select “ICF/ICD10 Subch” and then from the second drop-down menu, select “Height (297). The number in parentheses refers to the number of studies included in the displayed data. This is the first chart that is generated. If one identical (mz = monozygotic) twin is tall, there is a very good chance the other will be as well. If one is short, there is a very good chance the other will be as well. The correlation between being a twin and height is .91. The chart also gives correlations for just male identical twins (mzm = monozygotic male) and female identical twins (mzf = monozygotic female). If one fraternal (dz = dizygotic) twin is tall, there is a smaller chance the other will be as well – correlation of .54. Correlations are also given for all same-sex fraternal twins (dzss), just male fraternal twins (dzm), just female fraternal twins (dzf), and all other-sex fraternal twins (dos). Below the chart is this table. “Est.” is the estimated correlation based on the data from all of the studies included in the dataset. These are the correlations reported in the bar chart. “SE” is the standard error – the smaller the number, the more confident we are that the data reflect what’s true in the population. “Ntraits” are the number of studies in the dataset. “Npairs” are how many pairs of twins were included. While the correlations are interesting – and can certainly provide you with some interesting correlations when covering research methods – the real interesting stuff in this website comes from the last chart. This is where we get the “Reported ACE” – the heritability data. ACE is a model used among heritability researchers. A is additive genetics (the contribution of genes), C is common environment (the contribution of experiencing a shared environment), and E is [unique] environment (the contribution of our own, individual experiences). Before we get into the data, let’s a do a quick refresher of what heritability – and the ACE model – is. Within a population, people vary, say, in height. In the United States, the average height for adult females is about 5’ 4” (Onion, 2016). Some women are taller than that average, while others are shorter. It’s that difference between the shortest and the tallest – the variance – that ACE addresses. Let’s look at the “Reported ACE” chart for height. Picture this. Let’s say that we got all of the women in the United States together in one space. We measured each of their heights. A few would be less than 3 feet tall and a few would be more than 8 feet tall. Most would probably fall between 4’ 6” and 6’ 3 inches. The ACE model addresses where those differences in height come from. We are all going to be of some height just by virtue of being born. But what explains the differences in height among us? This article provides a nice explanation of heritability (Adam, 2012). “h2_all” is the heritability estimate for everybody based on the twin data. This means that 63% of the difference (the variability) in the height among all of us is due to genetics. “c2_all” is the estimate of the role played by a shared, common environment. This means that 30% of the difference in the height among all of us is due to a shared environment. Those two variables, genetics and common environment, together account for 93% (63% plus 30%) of the differences in our heights. The remaining 7%? That’s due to our unique environmental experiences. Please note that this says nothing about our own individual height. As a 5’ 4” female from the United States, this does NOT mean that 63% of my height is due to genetics. These numbers are only meaningful in explaining the differences in our heights across a population. To emphasize how population-driven heritability estimates are, on MaTCH’s left navigation menu, click on “Country.” Here you will see the data for height (if you were looking at the height variable) broken down by country. The ‘r’s are the correlations. Scroll to the right to see the heritability and common environment numbers. Canada, for example, shows 34% heritability for height and 60% for common environment, leaving 6% for unique environment. These numbers are very different from, say, the data for the United States. The U.S. shows 85% for heritability and 8% for common environment, leaving 7% for unique environment. Why might this be? Maybe Canadians are more genetically alike than are people in the U.S., thus differences amongst Canadians in their height must be more due to environment. Or maybe there just isn’t enough Canadian data. In the second column of that table, we see that three studies were used to calculate the Canadian estimates whereas 29 studies were used to calculate the U.S. data. There is much data here to explore. Before you dive too deeply into this website, watch this 15-minute tutorial video. Video Link : 1731 If you want to tackle this with your Intro Psych students, perhaps wherever you cover genetics, send your students to the MaTCH website to choose a psychologically relevant trait. Give your students a template like this to complete. The correlation for identical twins (mzall) on ______________ (enter trait name) is ________ (first line in the blue chart). The correlation for fraternal twins (dzall) on ______________ (enter trait name) is ________ (fourth line in the blue chart). The differences in  ______________ (enter trait name) within a population are _____% (h2_all) due to genetics, _____% (c2_all) due to a shared environment, and _____% (100 minus h2_all minus c2_all) due to a unique environment.   If students can’t find the trait they are interested in from the drop-down menu, they can click on “Find my Trait” in the top navigation bar. Searching on “intelligence” for example, tells us that that trait is lumped under “Higher-Level Cognitive Functions”. References Adam, G. (2012, September 6). What is heritability? Retrieved from Science 2.0: Join the Revolution: http://www.science20.com/gerhard_adam/what_heritability-93424   Onion, A. (2016, July 3). Why have Americans stopped growing taller? Retrieved from ABC News: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98438&page=1  ... View more

When people act friendly toward us, we tend to act friendly in return. When people act hostile toward us, we tend to act hostile in return. This is called complementarity (or complementary behavior). But what happens when we engage in noncomplementarity (or noncomplementary behavior); what happens when we don’t match the tone coming at us? Play this 8-minute video for your students. The first couple minutes set the scene. Eight friends are sitting outside on a summer evening. They’re chatting, drinking wine, and eating cheese. And then a man with a gun appears. He demands money, and if he doesn’t get it, he’ll start shooting. But there’s a problem. No one has any money. Pause the video at the two-minute mark. Ask students to discuss with the students around them what they would do. Invite volunteers to share their responses. Pause the video again at the 2:40 mark. Did the friends try any of your students’ solutions? At this point in the video, we’re about to learn what one guest tried. Do your students have any guesses as to what her solution was? Continue the video, and then at the 5:10 mark pause the video again. Give students a minute to think about what they just heard. Allow students a couple minutes to share their reactions with the students around them, then ask a couple volunteers to share their reactions. Finish playing the video. Ask students if they have an example where they experienced or witnessed noncomplementary behavior. Give students a minute to think of an example, then give students a couple minutes to share their examples in pairs or small groups. Finally, ask for a couple volunteers to share their examples. Be sure to identify what the initial tone was and how the response didn’t match. Conclude this activity by explaining how noncomplementary behavior is not limited to individuals. In Aarhus, Denmark, the police learned that some of their youth were disappearing; they left to join the terrorist group ISIS in Syria. Parents were panicked. While other countries were taking very strong approaches to such behavior, such as rescinding passports and shutting down mosques, the city of Aarhus took a very different approach. Thorleif Link and Allan Aarslev, Aarhus crime prevention officers, figured that treating these young people harshly would only make matters worse. Instead “[t]hey made it clear to citizens of Denmark who had traveled to Syria that they were welcome to come home, and that when they did, they would receive help with going back to school, finding an apartment, meeting with a psychiatrist or a mentor, or whatever they needed to fully integrate back into society.” Has their approach worked? “Starting in 2012, 34 people went from Aarhus to Syria. As far as the police know, six were killed and 10 are still over there. Of the 18 who came back home, all showed up in Aarslev and Link's office, as did hundreds of other potential radicals in Aarhus — about 330 in total.” The psychological scientist Arie Kruglanski believes that Aarhus is the first to “to grapple with [extremism] based on sound social psychology evidence and principles” (Rosin, 2016).  Leave students with this rhetorical question: what would happen if more people who led with hostility were met with kindness? Reference Rosin, H. (2016, July 15). How a Danish town helped young Muslims turn away from ISIS. Retrieved from Shots: Health News from NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/07/15/485900076/how-a-danish-town-helped-young-muslims-turn-away-from-isis ​  ... View more

At the Stanford Psych One Conference, Bridgette Hard (Stanford University) suggested clips from the British game show Golden Balls. Before covering the prisoners dilemma, show students the first 2.5 minutes of this 4-minute video. Stop the video at the 2:40 mark. Walk students through the prisoners dilemma, and then make sure students understand how this British game show presents contestants with a version of this dilemma. Note that in the original prisoners dilemma, the “prisoners” can’t communicate with each other before making their decision. Allowing contestants to discuss adds a level of drama that makes for good TV, but certainly changes the nature of the dilemma itself. Before playing the rest of clip, ask students to consider what they would do if they were Golden Balls contestant Steven. If you use a clicker system, ask students to click in with their vote for split or steal. Ask students to consider what they would do if they were contestant Sara. Again, ask students to click in with their vote. Now play the rest of the clip. After the contestants give their soundbites at the end, give students a few minutes to discuss with each other their reactions to the contestants’ comments. Next, show a contestant who chose a different strategy in this 4-minute clip. (This clip starts with the contestants’ discussion.) At that same Stanford Psych One Conference, Garth Neufeld (Highline College, but soon to be at Cascadia Community College), reported that the good folks at Radiolab interviewed these contestants in a 20-minute episode. In the first few minutes the Radiolab hosts lay out the premise of the game, then segue into discussing the clip from first episode above before launching into discussing the clip from the second episode. At about the 11-minute mark, the Radiolab hosts get Nick, of the different strategy, on the phone. During that interview we learn that even though the edited version of Nick and Ibrahim’s discussion that eventually aired was about 4 minutes, the actual, unedited – and apparently heated – discussion was 45 minutes. At the 18-minute mark of the Radiolab interview, we hear exactly how brilliant Nick’s strategy was. If you’re feeling a little – let’s call it adventurous – you can now do a version of what Dylan Selterman (University of Maryland) does (read more here). Selterman gives this question on his final exam: Here you have the opportunity to earn some extra credit on your final paper grade. Select whether you want 2 points or 6 points added onto your final paper grade. But there’s a small catch: if more than 10% of the class selects 6 points, then no one gets any points. Your responses will be anonymous to the rest of the class, only I will see the responses. You can add such a question to an exam or as a separate question delivered through your course management system. Or if you use some type of clicker system and you want students to publicly discuss, ask the question in class. How many times has Selterman given the extra credit between when he started offering it in 2008 and when he was interviewed about it in 2015? Once. ... View more

Originally posted on February 19, 2015. Soapbox alert: An earlier post expressed one of my pet peeves: the favoritism shown today’s senior citizens over more economically challenged Millennials and their children. A half century ago, I noted, it made good sense to give often-impoverished seniors discounts at restaurants, at movie theaters, and on trains. Today, the percent in poverty has flipped—with under-35 adults now experiencing twice the poverty of their over-65 parents. Since 1967, seniors’ poverty rate, thanks to economic growth, social security, and retirement programs, has dropped by two-thirds. (Social security payments have been inflation-adjusted, while minimum wage, dependent tax exemptions, and family assistance payments have not.) So, should it surprise us that new data from an APA national stress survey reveal that “Parents and younger generations are less likely than Americans overall to report being financially secure”? And should we, therefore, consider instead giving discounts to those who, on average, 1) most need it (perhaps custodial parents), and b) are the most stressed by financial worries? ... 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 7, 2014. How could a person resent making millions of dollars? Sam Polk suggests that some people develop wealth addiction. The more wealth they accumulate, the more money they need to achieve the same buzz. When they don’t get enough, they go into withdrawal and desire even greater wealth. Signs of wealth addiction pop up often. Consider Dennis Kozlowski, the former CEO of Tyco International and recently released prison inmate. He’s the guy who bought a $6,000 shower curtain and a $15,000 umbrella stand. If there was ever a model of wealth addiction, it’s this guy. Or is he? Society teaches us that money has power. My three year-old nephew, Graham, has no money sense. He doesn’t care if I give him a $1, $5, or $20 bill. Regardless of the value, he’ll wad it up and throw it across the room. Eventually he’ll learn about money, how to use it, and what it can give him. So, how do some people get so hooked on money? They may not be addicted to the money itself, but rather to the way money gains them entry into the broader social system. If my annual salary is $30,000, I feel accepted and included if my peers earn about the same. We can afford to eat at the same restaurants, pursue the same hobbies, and treat our romantic partners to similar gifts. But what if my annual salary stays the same and my peers begin to earn $300,000 annually? Now how can I relate to them? While I live paycheck to paycheck, they take international vacations, develop fine culinary tastes, and enjoy hobbies that demand a hefty entrance fee. I feel left out and alienated. Who can afford to fly to Tanzania and hike to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro? How many times can you use the word oaky to describe a wine’s taste? Who knew a triathlon bicycle could cost $13,500? If I want to join my high-earning friends, I need to earn more money. Social acceptance is the most valuable asset a person can own. We evolved a need for close and lasting relationships. This need to belong informs many of our decisions, even if we don’t realize it. And for good reason. For our ancestors, social exclusion was a death sentence. Even today, psychologists argue that loneliness harms health as much as smoking and obesity. How might money’s symbolic power influence how people approach their relationships? Consider the situation students faced in a group of clever studies conducted by Xinyue Zhou, Kathleen Vohs, and Roy Baumeister. Students believed they would complete a three-person, virtual ball-tossing game. Unbeknownst to the students, the virtual players’ behavior was preprogrammed to accept or reject them. The socially accepted students received the ball an equal number of times. The socially rejected students received a couple of tosses and never got the ball again. They watched as the two other players tossed the ball back and forth, back and forth, until the experimenter stopped the three-minute game. Imagine what those three grueling minutes were like. You enter a study expecting to toss a virtual ball to a pair of strangers. Now you find yourself reliving a scene from a school dance. You watch the cool kids enjoy the fun while you wait for someone to notice you’re there. Next, the students reported how much they desired money. Would social rejection, even by computer-animated strangers, influence how much people wanted money? It did. When students felt rejected, they wanted more money. What would that money give them? Relief from the pain of rejection. Simply handling money, rather than regular paper, was enough to shield the students from heartbreak. They even developed a thicker skin, enabling them to withstand more physical pain. What might have happened if those same students surrounded themselves with reminders of money all day? Would their confidence have grown and insecurities have weakened?      These findings paint a different portrait of so-called wealth addiction. Yes, some people develop an addiction to money. CEOs, real estate moguls, and their super-rich counterparts might shower themselves with yachts, private jets, and lavish estates. These money reminders might originate from an unquenchable thirst for money. When one yacht isn’t enough, buy a few more or build a bigger one. But wealth addiction may represent the exception rather than the rule. Many wealthy people only buy what they need. Warren Buffett prefers french fries over foie gras. Carlos Slim lives in the same house he purchased 40 years ago. Ingvar Kamprad flies economy class and drives an old Volvo.  What drives most people to become wealthy? People want the social acceptance they think wealth will give them. Greater wealth means access to more activities and relationship opportunities. What few people realize is that it’s often lonely at the top. Socially deprived people desire money to fill the void—and use reminders of money to stave off the pain of isolation. For the rest of us, it pays to surround ourselves with people who give our lives richness, complexity, and meaning. ... View more

Originally posted on April 9, 2014. Most of us have dreamt of having a personal genie. We summon the genie, it grants our wishes, and our lives get better. But we forget that our genie is not bent on improving our lives. The same genie can make you a hero or a villain; grateful or green with envy; cooperative or antagonistic. It all depends on how you ask your question. On the heels of research showing these positive and negative responses to the hormone oxytocin, we have a new genie in a bottle. Instead of rubbing a lamp to summon our genie, we sniff nasal spray. And with oxytocin nasal spray showing impressive benefits in offsetting deficits associated with certain mental conditions, it is time for researchers to get a grip on understanding when oxytocin will inspire us toward benevolence or malice. Oxytocin motivates bonding. But personality traits and situations can bend oxytocin’s influence. For example, people use different strategies to maintain their relationships. Most people act nice, forgive, and adapt to their partner’s needs. Others dominate their relationship partners, pummeling them into submission. Oxytocin might affect these two groups of people differently. The nice guys and gals should continue their efforts to keep their relationship together by acting nice. The dominators, in contrast, might go on the offensive and try to dominate their partners. To test this hypothesis, my colleagues and I randomly assigned college students to sniff either a placebo or oxytocin. The students waited patiently as the oxytocin took effect. While they waited, they completed some uncomfortable activities meant to provoke an aggressive response. They gave a stressful speech and also put an icy bandage on their foreheads. Next, participants reported their aggressive intentions toward a current or recent romantic partner. Some example items were “slap my partner” and “push or shove my partner.” Could the love hormone lead to violence? It could. Oxytocin increased aggressive intentions, but the effect only occurred among those who were predisposed toward aggression. The implication is that aggressive people try to keep their romantic partners close by dominating them. When they get a boost of oxytocin, it triggers an aggressive response. Oxytocin continues to inspire interest and confusion. We’re hard-wired to connect, and oxytocin can help make that happen. But this study shows that it isn’t enough to look at people’s oxytocin levels to know if they will act nice or aggressive. By understanding their personality traits, we can better predict whether the love hormone will promote benevolence or violence. ... 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 15, 2014. For those of us living in the American Midwest, it’s been an historic winter. The phrase “polar vortex,” once beholden to meteorologists, crept into daily conversation. Dozens of inches of snow, frozen pipes, and school cancellations can build stress, weariness, and even depression. To get rid of the blues, find the green space. Green spaces refer to parks, forests, or other parcels of land meant to connect people to nature. Numerous studies have shown that green spaces relate to better mental health. But one recent study took things to an entirely new level. A group of University of Wisconsin researchers, led by Kirsten Beyer, surveyed a representative sample of Wisconsin residents for mental health issues. They also used satellite imagery to estimate the amount of local green space. What did they find? The more green space people had close to them, the better their mental health. When people search for a new apartment, condo, or house, the only green they often consider is the money they need to spend. But these findings suggest that living near green spaces pays off by predicting better mental health. ... 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