Originally posted on May 12, 2014. Sleep consumes time we could spend foraging and it exposes us to predators.  It’s a waste and a risk.  So why do humans sleep?  Why didn’t nature design us for continual activity and vigilance? In the October 18, 2013 Science, researchers offer an answer:  sleep enables house cleaning.  Studies of mice show that sleep sweeps the brain of toxic metabolic waste products. Ergo, at the day’s end we can say to our loved ones:  Good night.  Sleep tidy. ... View more

Originally posted on May 14, 2014. Tyler Vigen, a Harvard Law student, has a new website (here) that offers “a fun way to look at correlations and to think about data.”  Among the whimsical spurious (chance) correlations he offers is one that offers a rare 1.0 correlation example.  I’ve reconstructed it into a form familiar to psychology teachers and students: ... View more

Originally posted on May 19, 2014. Self-serving bias—the tendency to perceive oneself favorably—has become one of personality-social psychology’s most robust phenomena.  It’s our modern rendition of ancient wisdom about pride, which theologians have considered the basic sin (much as Freud considered repression the basic defense mechanism). Self-serving bias appears in people’s judging themselves as better-than-average—on just about any subjective, socially desirable dimension.  Compared with people in general, most people see themselves as more ethical, friendly, intelligent, professionally competent, attractive, unprejudiced, and healthier—and even as more unbiased in their self-assessments! As part of my reporting on the world of psychology, I enjoy, as an affiliate British Psychological Society affiliate member, two of its journals, and also its Research Digest.  (The digest, authored by Christian Jarrett, is available as a free bimonthly e-mail here.) The Digest put a smirk on my face with its synopsis of a new British Journal of Social Psychology report by Constantine Sedikides, Rosie Meek, Mark Alicke, and Sarah Taylor.  The Sedikides team found that English prisoners incarcerated for violence and robbery saw themselves, compared with “an average member of the community,” as (I am not making this up) more moral, kind, and compassionate. Shelly Taylor’s humbling surmise, in her 1989 book, Positive Illusions, still rings true: “The [self-]portraits that we actually believe, when we are given freedom to voice them, are dramatically more positive than reality can sustain.” ... View more

Originally posted on May 21, 2014. A New York Times report on “the extreme sport” of remembering confirms what psychology instructors have long taught:  the power of mnemonic aids, especially organized images, to enable memory performance.  We humans are really good at retaining visual images, and we’re much better at later reproducing visualizable words (bicycle) than abstract words (process).  Thus it can help, when remembering a short grocery list, to use the peg-word system, with numerically ordered items—bun, shoe, tree, door, etc.—and to hang the grocery items on those images. Likewise, reports the Times article, all the competitors in a recent world memory contest used a “memory palace,” by associating to-be-remembered numbers, words, or cards with well-learned places, such as the rooms of a childhood home.  Challengers who claim to have invented an alternative method inevitably “come in last, or close to it,” noted one world-class competitor. Memory researchers who study these memorists report that they are, as you might expect, smart.  But they also have unusual capacities for focused attention and holding information in working memory. Yet, like you and me successfully forgetting previous locations of our car in the parking lot, they also need to be able to replace their place-item associations with new items. In this they are unlike students, who, if they are to become educated persons, need to retain information for months and years to come.  And for that there is no easy substitute for other well-researched memory aids, such as spaced practice, active rehearsal, and the memory consolidation that comes with a solid night’s sleep. ... View more

Originally posted on May 23, 2014. John Watson and Rosalie Rayner made psychologist history with their 1920 report of the fear conditioning of 11-month old “Little Albert.”  After repeated pairings of a white rat with an aversive loud noise, Albert reportedly began whimpering at the sight of the rat.  Moreover, his fear reaction generalized, to some extent, to the sight of a rabbit, a dog, and a sealskin coat, but not to more dissimilar objects. Ever since, people have wondered what became of Little Albert.  One team of psychologist-sleuths identified him as Douglas Merritte, the son of a campus hospital wet nurse who died of meningitis at age 6.  For a forthcoming article in the American Psychologist, another team of sleuths—Russell Powell, Nancy Digdon, Ben Harris, and Christopher Smithson—have identified an even more promising candidate.  William Albert Barger who went by “Albert B”—the very name used by Watson and Rayner—neatly fits many of Little Albert’s known characteristics.  This Albert was not brain-damaged and was easy-going, though (likely coincidentally, given how Albert’s fears would diminish between sessions) he had an aversion to dogs! Albert died in 2007, without ever knowing of his early life in a hospital residence, or of his apparent part in psychology’s history. ... View more

Originally posted on May 28, 2014. Climate change is upon us.  The recent National Climate Assessment, assembled by a large scientific panel, confirms that greenhouse gases continue to accumulate.  The planet is warming. The West Antarctic ice sheet is doomed. The seas have begun rising.  And more extreme weather will plague our future. Alas, most of the American public is not yet alarmed about this weapon of mass destruction.  The 31 percent who in 1998 thought “the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated” increased to 42 percent in 2014.  And the 34 percent of Americans who in 2014 told Gallup they worry “a great deal” about global warming was essentially the same as in 1989. Part of the problem is what psychologists and their students know as the availability heuristic. Our judgments get colored by mentally available events and images. And what’s more cognitively available than slow cli­mate change is our recently experienced local weather (see here and here).  Local recent temperature fluctuations tell us nothing about long-term planetary trends. (Our current weather is just weather.) Yet, given unusually hot local weather, people become more accepting of global climate warming, while a recent cold day reduces people’s concern about climate warming and overwhelms less memorable scientific data.  Snow in March?  “So much for global warming!” After Hurricane Sandy devastated New Jersey, its resi­dents’ vivid experience of extreme weather increased their environmentalism.  This suggests that a silver lining to the tragedy of more droughts, floods, heat waves, and other extreme weather may, in time, be increased public concern for climate change.  In the meantime, to offer a vivid depiction of climate change, Cal Tech scientists have created an interactive map of global temperatures over the last 120 years. ... View more

Originally posted on May 30, 2014. If asked that question, who would come to your mind? For a forthcoming Archives of Scientific Psychology report, Ed Diener (University of Illinois), Shigehiro Oishi (University of Virginia), and JunYeun Park (University of Illinois), painstakingly assembled data from citations, textbook page coverage, and major awards. Their top three, in order, were Albert Bandura (whose 218,219 citations also marked him as our most cited psychologist), Jean Piaget, and Daniel Kahneman. Looking just at introductory psychology textbook pages mentioning different psychologists, the top two were Robert Sternberg and Martin Seligman. ... View more

Originally posted on June 5, 2014. An amazingly comprehensive new Lancet study, with nearly 150 authors, tracks overweight and obesity rates across 188 countries from 1980 to 2013.  Some highlights: Worldwide, the proportion of overweight adults (BMI ≥ 25) increased from 29 to 37 percent among men and 30 to 38 percent among women. Over the last 33 years, no country has reduced its obesity rate. In 2010, “overweight and obesity were estimated to cause 3.4 million deaths.” National variations are huge, with the percentage overweight ranging 85 percent among adults in Tonga to 3 percent in Timor-Leste. The study is amazing not only in its global comprehensiveness, across time, but also in its public, interactive data archive available from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. As a screen shot example, I compared the U.S. increase in the overweight percentage (upper dark line) with the global increase (lower dark line).  All other countries are in light blue. ... View more

Originally posted on June 12, 2014. My last post—noting the new worldwide estimate that 37 percent of men and 38 percent of women are overweight—got me to wondering if we have other examples of all-humanity data. One is our species’ life expectancy, which has risen from 46.5 years in the early 1950s to 70 years today. What a gift—two dozen more years of life! And then we have new data from the Gallup World Poll which is surveying countries with more than 98 percent of the world’s population. Aggregating data from this resource, Ed Diener, Louis Tay, and I were able to answer (here) this simple question: Asked, “Is religion important in your daily life?,” what percent of humanity will respond “yes”? The answer: 68 percent. Two in three humans. When mentioning this answer in talks, I offer, with a smirk, the usual caveat on reporting survey data: We should be cautious about generalizing beyond the population sampled. (These data represent but one species on one planet, and may not represent the views of other life forms elsewhere in the universe.) What’s striking about each of these all-humanity measures is the extraordinary variation across countries—from 3 percent overweight adults in Timor-Leste to 85 percent in Tonga; from 49 year life expectancy in Chad to 89 in Monaco; from 16 percent for whom religion is important in Estonia to 100 percent in Bangladesh and Niger. We humans are all kin beneath the skin. Yet how we differ. [A note to our valued readers:  Nathan DeWall and I anticipate a more relaxed two-a-week pace of blogging this summer, and returning to our weekday postings at the summer’s end.] ... View more

Originally posted on June 17, 2014 Is religion toxic to human flourishing . . . or is it supportive of human happiness, health, and helpfulness? Let’s make this empirical: Is religious engagement associated with humans living well, or with misery, ill-health, premature death, crime, divorce, teen pregnancy, and the like? The answer differs dramatically by whether we compare places (such as more versus less religious countries or states) or individuals. For starters, I manually harvested data from a Gallup World Poll, and found a striking negative correlation across 152 countries between national religiosity and national well-being: Then I harvested General Social Survey data from the U.S. and found—as many other researchers in many other countries have found (though especially in more religious countries) a positive correlation between religiosity and happiness across individuals. For additional striking examples of the religious engagement paradox—associating religious engagement with life expectancy, smoking, arrest rate, teen pregnancy, and more (across states versus across individuals)—see here. Princeton economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Arthur Stone have recently been struck by the same paradox. They ask (here), “Why might there be this sharp contradiction between religious people being happy and healthy, and religious places being anything but?” Before answering that question—and wondering whether the more important story is told at the aggregate or individual level—consider a parallel paradox, which we might call “the politics of wealth paradox.” Question: Are rich Americans more likely to vote Republican or Democrat? When we compare states (thanks to Chance News) we can see that low income predicts Republican preferences. Folks in wealthy states are more likely to vote Democratic!  So, being rich inclines one to liberalism? Not so fast: comparing individuals, we see the opposite (and more expected) result—high income folks vote more Republican. These are the sorts of findings that excite behavioral science sleuths. Surely there must be some confounding variables. With religiosity, one such variable is income—which is lower in highly religious countries and states. Controlling for status factors such as income (as Louis Tay did for our article with Ed Diener) and the negative correlation between religiosity and well-being disappears, and even reverses to slightly positive. Likewise, low income states differ from high income states in many ways, including social values that also predict voting. Ergo, my hunch is that, in both the religious and political realms, the most important story is found at the level of the individual. Nevertheless, there are practical uses for these data. If you’re wanting to make religious engagement look bad, use the aggregate, macro-level data. If you want to make religious engagement look good, use the individual data. ... View more

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