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 October 14, 2014. What would you consider psychology’s ten most provocative and controversial studies?  Christian Jarrett, a great communicator of psychological science via the British Psychological Society’s free Research Digest, offers his top ten list here.  A quick recap: 1. The Stanford Prison Experiment (aka the Stanford Prison Simulation) 2. The Milgram "Shock Experiments" 3. The "Elderly-related Words Provoke Slow Walking" Experiment (and other social priming research) 4. The Conditioning of Little Albert 5.  Loftus' "Lost in The Mall" Study 6. The Daryl Bem Pre-cognition Study 7.  The Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience study 8. The Kirsch Anti-Depressant Placebo Effect Study 9. Judith Rich Harris and the "Nurture Assumption" 10. Libet's Challenge to Free Will This is, methinks, a great list.  All ten have captured my attention and reporting (although I would reframe #5 to indicate Beth Loftus’s larger body of research on false memories and the misinformation effect).  Are there other studies that would make your top ten list? In the cover story of the October APS Observer, Carol Tavris reflects on “Teaching Contentious Classics,” which include the Milgram experiments, and also Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment and Harlow’s baby monkey experiments, the latter of which surely also merits inclusion on any list of psychology’s most controversial studies. ... View more

Originally posted on October 21, 2014. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz uses aggregate data from Google to see if parents’ hopes for their children are gender-neutral. He reports that, actually, many parents seem eager to have smart sons and slender, beautiful daughters. You can see this for yourself (heads-up to teachers:  a cool in-class demonstration here). Google (with quote marks) and note the number of results: “Is my daughter gifted” “Is my son gifted” “Is my son overweight” “Is my daughter overweight” As an example, here’s another pair I just tried (the OR commands a Boolean search of either version): ... 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

Originally posted on December 2, 2014. As I explain in a recent APS Observer essay (here), my short list of psychology’s greatest research programs includes the 250+ scientific publications that have followed Scottish lives from childhood to later life.  The studies began with all Scottish 11-year-olds taking intelligence tests in 1932 and in 1947 (the results of which Ian Deary and his team discovered many years later).  After meeting Deary at an Edinburgh conference in 2006 and hearing him describe his tracking these lives through time, I have followed his team’s reports of their cognitive and physical well-being with great fascination. Last April, some 400 alums of the testing—now 93 or 78 years old (including those shown with Deary below)—gathered at the Church of Scotland’s Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, where Deary regaled them with the fruits of their participation. One of his conclusions, as reported by the October 31st Science​, is that “participants’ scores at age 11 can predict about 50% of the variance in their IQs at age 77.” I invited Professor Deary to contribute some PowerPoint slides of his studies for use by teachers of psychology.  He generously agreed, and they may be found here. Photo courtesy of Ian Deary. ... View more

Originally posted on December 9, 2014. Economic inequality is a fact of life.  Moreover, most folks presume some inequality is inescapable and even desirable, assuming that achievement deserves financial reward and that the possibility of making more money motivates effort. But how much inequality is good?  Psychologists have found that places with great inequality tend to be less happy places, and that when inequality grows so does perceived unfairness, which helps offset the psychological benefits of increased affluence.  When others around us have much more than we do, feelings of “relative deprivation” may abound. And as Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson document, countries with greater inequality also experience greater health and social problems, and higher rates of mental illness. So, how great is today’s economic inequality? Researchers Michael Norton and Dan Ariely invited 5,522 Americans to estimate the percent of wealth possessed by the richest 20 percent in their country. The average person’s guess—58 percent—“dramatically underestimated” the actual wealth inequality. (The wealthiest 20 percent possessed 84 percent of the wealth.) And how much inequality would be ideal?  The average American favored the richest 20 percent taking home between 30 and 40 percent of the income—and, in their survey, the Republican versus Democrat difference was surprisingly modest. Now, working with Sorapop Kiatpongsan in Bangkok, Norton offers new data from 55,238 people in 40 countries, which again shows that people vastly underestimate inequality, and that people’s ideal pay gaps between big company CEOs and unskilled workers is much smaller than actually exists.  In the U.S., for example, the actual pay ratio of S&P 500 CEOs to their unskilled workers (354:1) far exceeds the estimated ratio (30:1) and the ideal ratio (7:1). Their bottom line:  “People all over the world and from all walks of life would prefer smaller pay gaps between the rich and poor.” ... View more

Originally posted on December 16, 2014. The December APS Observer is out with an essay by Nathan on “The Neural Greenhouse:  Teaching Students How to Grow Neurons and Keep Them Alive.” Our brains are like greenhouses, he notes, with new neurons sprouting daily, “while others wither and die.” To take this neuroscience into the classroom, he offers three activities. In the same issue, I say, “Let’s Hear a Good Word for Self-Esteem.” Mindful of recent research on the perils of excessive self-regard—of illusory optimism, self-serving bias, and the like—I offer a quick synopsis of work on the benefits of a sense of one’s self-worth. I also offer Google ngram figures showing sharply increased occurrences of “self-esteem” in printed English over the last century, and of decreasing occurrences of “self-control.” ... View more