Originally posted on June 26, 2014. The development of adolescent impulse control lags sensation-seeking.  That’s the bottom line result of Laurence Steinberg’s report from surveys of more than 7000 American 12- to 24-year-olds, as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth and Children and Young Adults. Sensation-seeking behaviors peak in the mid teens, with impulse control developing more slowly as frontal lobes mature. These trends fit nicely with data from longitudinal studies that, after following lives through time, find that most people become more conscientious, stable, agreeable, and self-confident in the years after adolescence.  The encouraging message for parents of 15-year-olds: you may be pleasantly surprised at your more self-controlled 25-year-old offspring to come.  And for courts, says Steinberg, the brain development and behavioral data together should inform decisions about the criminal sentencing of juveniles. ... View more

Originally posted on July 1, 2014. In all of recent psychological science, there has been, to my mind, no more provocative studies those by Benjamin Libet.  His experiments have seemingly shown that when we move our wrist at will, we consciously experience the decision to move it about 0.2 seconds before the actual movement. No surprise there. But what startled me was his reporting that our brain waves jump about 0.35 seconds before we consciously perceive our decision to move! This “readiness potential” has enabled researchers (using fMRI brain scans) to predict participants’ decisions to press a button with their left or right finger. The startling conclusion: Consciousness sometimes appears to arrive late to the decision-making party. And so it has also seemed in Michael Gazzaniga’s reports of split-brain patients who readily confabulate (make up and believe) plausible but incorrect explanations for their induced actions. If Gazzinga instructs a patient’s right brain to “Walk,” the patient’s unaware left hemisphere will improvise an explanation for walking: “I’m going into the house to get a Coke.”  The conscious left brain is the brain’s public relations system—its explanation-constructing “interpreter.” So, do Libet’s and Gazzaniga’s observations destroy the concept of free will?  Does our brain really make decisions before our conscious mind knows about them?  Do we fly through life on autopilot?  Are we (our conscious minds) mere riders on a wild beast? Not so fast.  Stanislas Dehaene and his colleagues report that brain activity continuously ebbs and flows, regardless of whether a decision is made and executed.  The actual decision to move, they observe, occurs when the brain activity crosses a threshold, which happens to coincide with the average “time of awareness of intention to move” (about 0.15 second before the movement).  In their view, the mind’s decision and the brain’s activity, like a computer’s problem solving and its electronic activity, are parallel and virtually simultaneous. The late neuroscientist Donald MacKay offered a seemingly similar idea:  “When I am thinking, my brain activity reflects what I am thinking, as [computer’s] activity reflects the equation it is solving.”  The mind and brain activities are yoked (no brain, no mind), he argued, but are complementary and conceptually distinct.  As my colleague Tom Ludwig has noted, MacKay’s view—that mental events are embodied in but not identical to brain events—is a third alternative to both dualism and materialism (physicalism). ... View more

Originally posted on July 8, 2014. In a new Politico essay (here) I offer four social psychological principles that shed light on enmities both violent (Sunni v. Shia) and playful (sports rivalries). ... View more

Originally posted on July 24, 2014. Some recent naturalistic observations illustrated for me the results of longitudinal studies of human development—studies that follow lives across time, noting our capacities for both stability and change. My procedure, though time-consuming, was simple: Observation Stage 1:  Attend a small college, living on campus with ample opportunity to observe my many friends. Intervening experience:  Let 50 years of life unfold, taking us to varied places. Observation Stage 2:  Meet and talk with these friends again, at a college reunion. Time and again, researchers have documented the remarkable stability of emotionality, intelligence, and personality across decades of life.  “As at age 7, so at 70” says a Jewish proverb. And so it was for my friends (with names changed to protect identities).  Thoughtful, serious Joe was still making earnest pronouncements.  Driven, status-conscious Louise continues to visibly excel.  Exuberant Mark could still talk for ten minutes while hardly catching a breath.  Gentle, kind Laura was still sensitive and kindhearted.  Mischievous, prankster George still evinced an edgy, impish spirit.  Smiling, happy Joanne still readily grinned and laughed.  I was amazed:  a half century, and yet everyone seemed the same person that walked off that graduation stage. In other ways, however, life is a process of becoming.  Compared to temperament and to traits such as extraversion, social attitudes are more amenable to change.  And so it was for us, with my formerly kindred-spirited dorm mates having moved in different directions . . . some now expressing tea partyish concerns about cultural moral decay and big government, and others now passionate about justice and support for gay-lesbian aspirations.  Before they opened their mouths, I had no idea which was going to be which. And isn’t that the life experience of each of us—that our development is a story of both stability and change.  Stability, rooted in our enduring genes and brains, provides our identity . . . while our potential for change enables us to grow with experience and to hope for a brighter future. (For more on the neurobiology that underlies our stable individuality, and on the brain plasticity that enables our changing, see Richard Davidson’s recent Dana Foundation essay.) ... View more

Originally posted on August 7, 2014. One of the many delights from the Stanford’s recent conference on teaching introductory psychology was being with and hearing Boise State professor Eric Landrum.  The exuberant Landrum is a longtime teaching-of-psychology leader, researcher, and author—and the 2014 president of the Society of the Teaching of Psychology. His presentation offered his “all-time favorite PowerPoint slide.”  It summarizes the conclusions of research by Michigan State’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute showing the main reasons why new college grads get fired.  These include: Lack of work ethic, failure to follow instructions, missing assignments or deadlines, and being late. Sound familiar?  Landrum, who studies what helps students succeed, draws a moral from these findings:  By simulating a real world employer, and holding to standards, he is doing them a great favor.  He is preparing them for real world success. ... View more

Originally posted on August 12, 2014. One of social psychology’s intriguing and oft-replicated findings is variously known as the “own-race bias,” the “other-race effect,” and the “cross-race effect”—all of which describe the human tendency to recall faces of one’s own race more accurately than faces of other races. “They”—the members of some other group—seem to look more alike than those in our own group.  With greater exposure to other-race faces, as when residing among those of a different race, people improve at recognizing individual faces.  Still, the phenomenon is robust enough that social psychologists have wondered what underlies it.  In the July Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a research team led by Kerry Kawakami at York University offers a possible contributing factor:  When viewing faces during several experiments, White participants attended more to the eyes of White people, and to the nose and mouth of Black people.  Eye gaze, they reason, is “individuating”—it helps us discern facial differences.  Thus the ingroup eye-gaze difference may help explain the own-race bias. ... View more

Originally posted on August 21, 2014. One of psychology’s big discoveries is our almost irresistible tendency to judge the likelihood of events by how mentally available they are—a mental shortcut that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identified as “the availability heuristic.”  Thus anything that makes information pop into mind—its vividness, recency, or distinc­tiveness—can make it seem common­place.  (Kahneman explores the power of this concept at length in Thinking Fast and Slow, which stands with William James’ Principles of Psychology on my short list of greatest-ever psychology books.) My favorite example of the availability heuristic at work is people’s misplaced fear of flying.  As I document in the upcoming Psychology, 11th Edition, from 2009 to 2011 Americans were—mile for mile—170 times more likely to die in a vehicle accident than on a sched­uled flight.  When flying, the most dangerous part of our journey is typically the drive to the airport.  In a late 2001 essay, I calculated that if—because of 9/11—we in the ensuing year flew 20 percent less and instead drove half those unflown miles, about 800 more people would die.  German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer later checked my estimate against actual traffic fatalities (why didn’t I think to do that?) and found that traffic fatalities did, indeed, jump after 9/11.  Thanks to those readily available, horrific mental images, terrorists had killed more people on American highways than died on those four ill-fated planes. The availability heuristic operates in more mundane ways as well.  This morning I awoke early at an airport hotel, where I had been waylaid after a flight delay.  The nice woman working the breakfast bar told me of how she, day after day, meets waylaid passengers experiencing weather problems, crew delays, and mechanical problems.  Her conclusion (from her mentally available sample of flyers):  something so often goes awry that if she needed to travel, she would never fly. Vivid examples make us gasp.  Probabilities we hardly grasp. ... View more

Originally posted on August 26, 2014. In a recent New York Times essay (here), Henry Roediger explains the insights gleaned from his research on “the testing effect”— the enhanced memory that follows actively retrieving information, rather than simply rereading it. Psychologists sometimes also refer to this phenomenon as “test-enhanced learning,” or as the “retrieval practice effect” (because the benefits derive from the greater rehearsal of information when self-testing rather than rereading). As Roediger explains, “used properly, testing as part of an educational routine provides an important tool not just to measure learning, but to promote it.” For students and teachers, I offer a 5-minute animated explanation of the testing effect and how to apply it in one’s own study.  (I intend this for a class presentation or viewing assignment in the first week of a course.) See Make Things Memorable!  How to Study and Learn More Effectively. ... View more

Originally posted on September 3, 2014. Skimming Paul Taylor’s, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown, a 2014 report of Pew Research Center data on U.S. social trends, brought to mind one of my pet peeves: the favoritism shown to seniors over today’s more economically challenged Millennials and their children. Since passing into AARP-eligible territory, I have often purchased fares or tickets at discounted prices, while the single parent in line behind me got hit with a higher price. One website offers 250,000+ discounts for folks over 50. A half-century and more ago it made sense to give price breaks to often-impoverished seniors wanting a night out at the movies, hungry for a restaurant meal, or needing to travel on buses and trains. Many seniors still struggle to make ends meet and afford housing.  But thanks to improved Social Security and retirement income and to decreased expenses for dependents and mortgages, their median net worth has been increasing—37 percent since 1984, Taylor shows, while those under 35 have seen their net worth plummet 44 percent. And consider who are today’s poor (from this figure available here as well as in Taylor’s excellent book). Among the predictors is not only race but age.  Compared to four decades ago, today’s under-35 generation experiences a nearly doubled risk of poverty, while their senior counterparts suffer one-third the poverty rate of their 1960s counterparts Ergo, in view of this historical change in poverty risk, should we adjust our social priorities? Might a more child-affirming culture consider discounts for card-carrying custodial parents? And could we not offer inflation adjustments not only to senior citizen Social Security stipends but also to minimum wages, tax exemptions for dependents, and family and food assistance? ... View more

Originally posted on September 5, 2014. Feeling stressed by multiple demands for your time and attention?  Daniel Levitin, director of McGill University’s Laboratory for Music, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University and author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, has some suggestions.  In a recent New York Times essay, he advises structuring our day to give space both for undistracted task-focused work and for relaxed mind-wandering: If you want to be more productive and creative, and to have more energy, the science dictates that you should partition your day into project periods. Your social networking should be done during a designated time, not as constant interruptions to your day. Email, too, should be done at designated times. An email that you know is sitting there, unread, may sap attentional resources as your brain keeps thinking about it, distracting you from what you’re doing. What might be in it? Who’s it from? Is it good news or bad news? It’s better to leave your email program off than to hear that constant ping and know that you’re ignoring messages. Increasing creativity will happen naturally as we tame the multitasking and immerse ourselves in a single task for sustained periods of, say, 30 to 50 minutes. Several studies have shown that a walk in nature or listening to music can trigger the mind-wandering mode. This acts as a neural reset button, and provides much needed perspective on what you’re doing. As one who is distracted by a constant stream of e-mails and the temptations of favorite web sites, this is advice I should take to heart.  But I have benefitted from an e-mail system that diverts e-mails that come to my public e-mail address (including political fund-raising appeals and list mail) from those that come to a private e-mail address known to family and colleagues.  The public e-mails are sent my mail only at the day’s end. I also find it helpful to take work out to coffee shops, including one that doesn’t have Internet access.  “They should charge your extra for that,” observed one friend. In our upcoming Psychology, 11th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I offer some further advice: In today’s world, each of us is challenged to maintain a healthy balance between our real-world and online time. Experts offer some practical suggestions for balancing online connecting and real-world responsibilities. • Monitor your time. Keep a log of how you use your time. Then ask yourself, “Does my time use reflect my priorities? Am I spending more or less time online than I in­tended? Is my time online interfering with school or work performance? Have family or friends commented on this?” • Monitor your feelings. Ask yourself, “Am I emotionally distracted by my online inter­ests? When I disconnect and move to another activity, how do I feel?” • “Hide” your more distracting online friends. And in your own postings, practice the golden rule. Before you post, ask yourself, “Is this something I’d care about reading if someone else posted it?” • Try turning off your mobile devices or leaving them elsewhere. Selective attention—the flashlight of your mind—can be in only one place at a time. When we try to do two things at once, we don’t do either one of them very well (Willingham, 2010). If you want to study or work productively, resist the temptation to check for updates. Disable sound alerts and pop-ups, which can hijack your attention just when you’ve managed to get focused. (I am proofing and editing this chapter in a coffee shop, where I es­cape the distractions of the office.) • Try a social networking fast (give it up for an hour, a day, or a week) or a time-con­trolled social media diet (check in only after homework is done, or only during a lunch break). Take notes on what you’re losing and gaining on your new “diet.” • Refocus by taking a nature walk. People learn better after a peaceful walk in the woods, which—unlike a walk on a busy street—refreshes our capacity for focused attention (Berman et al., 2008). Connecting with nature boosts our spirits and sharpens our minds (Zelenski & Nisbet, 2014). ... View more

Originally posted on September 9, 2014. How do we know ourselves?  It’s partly by observing our own actions, proposed Daryl Bem’s self-perception theory.  Hearing ourselves talk can give us clues to our own attitudes.  Witnessing our actions gives us insight into the strength of our convictions (much as we observe others’ behavior and make inferences). Our behavior is often self-revealing. The limits of such self-revelation have recently been explored by one of psychology’s most creative research teams at Sweden’s Lund University. The researchers, including Andreas Lind, were curious: “What would it be like if we said one thing and heard ourselves saying something else?” Would we experience an alien voice?  An hallucination? Would we believe our ears? Through a noise-cancelling headset, the participants heard themselves name various font colors, such as the word green presented in a gray font color. But sometimes, the wily researchers substituted a participant’s own voice saying a previously recorded word, such as “green” instead of the correctly spoken “gray.” Surprisingly, two-thirds of these word switches went undetected, with people typically experiencing the inserted word as self-produced! (For more from the creative Lund University "choice blindness" research group, see here.) A second new demonstration of the self-revealing power of our own behavior comes from research on the effects of feedback from our face and body muscles. As we have known for some time, subtly inducing people to make smiling rather than frowning expressions—or to stand, sit, or walk in an expansive rather than contracted posture—affects people’s self-perceptions.  Motions affect emotions. At the University of Cologne, Sascha Topolinski and his colleagues report that even subtle word articulation movements come tinged with emotion.  In nine experiments they observed that both German- and English-speaking people preferred nonsense words and names spoken with inward (swallowing-like) mouth movements—for example, “BENOKA”—rather than outward (spitting-like) motions, such as KENOBA.  Ostensible chat partners given names (e.g., Manero) that activated ingestion muscles were preferred over chat partners whose names activated muscles associated with expectoration (e.g., Gasepa). Self-perception theory lives on.  Sometimes we observe ourselves and infer our thoughts and feelings. ... View more

Originally posted on September 15, 2014. Every once in a while I reread something that I've reported across editions of my texts, scratch my head, and ask myself: Is this really true? Such was the case as I reread my reporting that “With the help of 382 female and 312 male volunteers. . . Masters and Johnson monitored or filmed more than 10,000 ‘sexual cycles.’” Really? I wasn't just makin’ stuff up.  Masters and Johnson do report (on page 15 of Human Sexual Response) their “conservative estimate of 10,000 complete sexual response cycles” in their laboratory (some involving multiple female orgasms). But let’s do the numbers.  If they observed 10,000 complete sexual cycles over eight years[1] (from 1957 to 1965), then they averaged 1,250 sexual cycles observed per year.  Could we assume about an hour dedicated to each observation—including welcoming the participant(s), explaining the day’s tasks, attaching instruments, observing their behavior, debriefing them, and recording their observations?  And could we assume about 40 weeks a year of observation?  (Meanwhile, they were also running a sexual therapy clinic, writing, managing a lab, etc.) So . . . doing the numbers . . . that’s roughly 31 weekly hours observing sex . . . for eight years. It boggles the mind.  And one wonders: Wasn't there some point of diminishing returns from observing yet another 1000 hours of sex . . . assuming Masters and Johnson reported truthfully? I have no basis for doubting the accuracy and integrity of Masters and Johnson’s reporting.  But I do, in a spirit of curiosity, scratch my head. [1] In Human Sexual Response, they report gathering data over “eleven years” (pp. 9, 20).  But Johnson didn't join Masters until 1957, and Johnson biographer Genoa Ferguson reports that Johnson “began doing sexual function research 6 months into her research position.” Also, Masters and Johnson report (p. 10) that the first 20 months of the observations—presumably by Masters without Johnson—involved medical histories of 118 prostitutes, eleven of whom “were selected for anatomic and physiologic study.”  Ergo, although Masters and Johnson’s reporting leaves the exact study period ambiguous, it appears that the great majority, if not all, of the reported 10,000+ “complete sexual responses cycles” were observed during the seven or eight years after Johnson began her work with Masters. They also do not document the lab layout, or precisely how they observed their subjects. (As a point of contrast, Stanley Milgram’s similarly classic Obedience to Authority did precisely report on the participants, methods, and results of his various experiments, including drawings of the lab layout and equipment.) ... View more

Originally September 7, 2014. My wife loves me, despite smirking that I am “boringly predictable.”  Every day, I go to bed at pretty much the same time, rise at the same time, pull on my khaki pants and brown shoes, frequent the same coffee shops, ride the same old bicycle, and exercise every weekday noon hour.  As I walk into my Monday-Wednesday-Friday breakfast spot, the staff order up my oatmeal and tea.  I’ll admit to boring. But there is an upside to mindless predictability.  As my colleagues-friends Roy Baumeister, Julia Exline, Nathan DeWall and others have documented, self-controlled decision-making is like a muscle.  It temporarily weakens after an exertion (a phenomenon called “ego depletion”) and replenishes with rest. Exercising willpower temporarily depletes the mental energy needed for self-control on other tasks.  It even depletes the blood sugar and neural activity associated with mental focus. In one experiment, hungry people who had resisted the temptation to eat chocolate chip cookies gave up sooner on a tedious task (compared with those who had not expended mental energy on resisting the cookies). President Obama, who appreciates social science research, understands this.  As he explained to Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis, “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”  Lewis reports that Obama mentioned “research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions,” noting that Obama added, “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” So, amid today’s applause for “mindfulness,” let’s put in a word for mindlessness.  Mindless, habitual living frees our minds to work on more important things than which pants to wear or what breakfast to order.  As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” ... View more

Originally posted on September 30, 2014. Behavior geneticists have gifted us with two stunning findings—discoveries that overturned what I used to believe about the environment’s power to shape personality.  One, dramatically illustrated by the studies of identical twins separated near birth, is the heritability of personality and intelligence.  The other, dramatically illustrated by the dissimilar personalities and talents of adoptive children raised in the same home and neighborhood, is the modest influence of “shared environment.” I know, I know . . . studies of impoverishment during the preschool years, of epigenetic constraints on genetic expression, and of family influences on attitudes, values, and beliefs, remind us that genetic dispositions are always expressed in particular environments.  Nature and nurture interact. And might identical twins have similar personalities not just because of their shared genes, but also their environments responding to their similar looks?  If only there were people who similarly look alike but don’t share the same genes. Happily there are unrelated look-alikes—nontwin “doppelgängers” identified by Montreal photographer François Brunelle (do visit some examples here).  California State University, Fullerton, twin researcher Nancy Segal seized this opportunity to give personality and self-esteem inventories to these human look-alikes. Unlike identical twins, the look-alikes did not have notably similar traits and self-esteem (see here). And in a new follow-up study with Jamie Graham and Ulrich Ettinger (here), she replicates that finding and also reports that the look-alikes (unlike biological twin look-alikes) did not develop special bonds after meeting their doppelgänger.  The take-home message.  Genes matter more than looks. As the evolutionary psychologists remind us, kinship biology matters. ... View more

Originally posted on November 11, 2014. A  recent Beijing visit left me marveling at students’ academic enthusiasm.  In explaining Asian students’ outperformance of North American students, researchers have documented cultural differences in conscientiousness. Asian students spend more time in school and much more time studying (and see here for one recent study of the academic diligence of Asian-Americans). The Beijing experience gave me several glimpses of this culture difference in achievement drive and eagerness to learn.  For example, as I dined more than a half hour before speaking at the Peking University psychology department, word came that 160 students were already present.  After my talk in the overfilled auditorium (below), student hands across the room were raised, with some waving hands or standing up, pleading to be able to ask their questions.  And this was a Friday evening. Later that weekend, I met with teachers of AP psychology, whose students at select Beijing high schools pay to take AP courses in hopes of demonstrating their capacity to do college-level work in English, and thus to gain admission to universities outside China.  Several of the teachers were Americans, one of whom chuckled when explaining that, unlike in the USA, she sought to demotivate her overly motivated students, encouraging them to lighten up and enjoy life. The plural of these anecdotes of culture difference is not data. (My China sample was biased—high achieving students who had gained admission to the most elite schools.) But the experiences, which replicated what I experienced in a 2008 visit to Beijing, were memorable. ... View more