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Talk Psych Blog - Page 5
Showing articles with label Social Psychology.
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Author
01-24-2019
07:42 AM
This www.TalkPsych.com entry offers three news flashes—samples of research that have captured my attention (and may wend their way into future textbook editions). NEWS FLASH # 1:Intergroup contact makes us “less inward looking and more open to experiences.” As any social psychology student knows, friendly contact with other sorts of folks engenders positive attitudes. For example, as an earlier TalkPsych essay documented, regions with more immigrants have more welcoming, positive attitudes toward immigrants. Places without immigrants fear them the most. But intergroup contact does more than improve our attitudes toward others. Research by Brock University psychologist Gordon Hodson and his British colleagues reveals that intergroup contact affects our thinking—it loosens us up, promoting cognitive flexibility, novel problem solving, and increased creativity. This observation complements earlier research that demonstrated, after controlling for other factors, that students who studied in another culture became more flexibly adept at creative problem solving (see here and here). NEWS FLASH # 2: More than we suppose, other people like us. Do you sometimes worry that people you’ve just met don’t like you very much? Actually, recent studies by Cornell University researcher Erica Boothby and her colleagues found that people rate new conversational partners as more enjoyable and likeable than the new partner presumes. Despite our shared self-serving bias (the tendency to overestimate our own knowledge, abilities, and virtues), we tend to underestimate the impressions we make on others. Moreover, the shyer the person, the bigger the liking gap—the underestimate of others’ liking of us. Ergo, the next time you fret over whether you were too quiet, too chatty, or too wrinkled and rumpled, be reassured: Others probably liked you more than you realize. NEWS FLASH # 3: The youngest children in a school class are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. The current psychiatric disorder manual broadens the criteria for diagnosing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), thus increasing the number of children so diagnosed. Some say the diagnosis enables helpful treatment and improved functioning. Skeptics say the broadened criteria pathologize immature rambunctiousness, especially among boys—whom evolution has not designed to sit passively at school desks. Support for the skeptics comes from a New England Journal of Medicine study that followed 407,846 U.S. children from birth to elementary school. ADHD diagnoses were a stunning 34 percent higher among those born in August in states with a September 1 cutoff for school entry—but not higher among children in states with other cutoff dates. This massive study confirms earlier reports (here and here) that the youngest children in a class tend to be more fidgety—and more often diagnosed with ADHD—than their older peers. Such findings illustrate why I feel privileged to be gifted with the time, and the responsibility, to learn something new most every day. For me, the primary job of writing is not making words march up a screen, but reading and reading, searching for insights—for gems amid the rocks—that educated people should know about. (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit www.TalkPsych.com.)
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Developmental Psychology
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Social Psychology
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1,580

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01-03-2019
12:26 PM
As Pope Francis has said, “Everyone’s existence is deeply tied to that of others.” We are social animals. We need to belong. We flourish when supported by close relationships. Finding a supportive confidante, we feel joy. Longing for acceptance and love, Americans spend $86 billion annually on cosmetics, fragrances, and personal care products—and billions more on clothes, hair styling, and diets. Is that money well spent? Will it help us find and form meaningful relationships? Consider one of social psychology’s most provocative, and simplest, experiments. Cornell University students were asked to don a Barry Manilow T-shirt (at the behest of researcher Thomas Gilovich and colleagues) and were then shown into a room where several others were completing questionnaires. Afterwards they were asked to guess how many of the others noticed their dorky attire. Their estimate? About half. Actually, only 23 percent did. Other experiments confirm this spotlight effect—an overestimation of others’ noticing us, as if a spotlight is shining on us. The phenomenon extends to our secret emotions. Thanks to an illusion of transparency we presume that our attractions, our disgust, and our anxieties leak out and become visible to others. Imagine standing before an audience: If we’re nervous and we know it, will our face surely show it? Not necessarily. Even our lies and our lusts are less transparent than we imagine. There’s bad news here: Others notice us less than we imagine (partly because they are more worried about the impressions they are making). But there’s also good news: Others notice us less than we imagine. And that good news is liberating: A bad hair day hardly matters. And if we wear yesterday’s clothes again today, few will notice. Fewer will care. Of those, fewer still will remember. If normal day-to-day variations in our appearance are hardly noticed and soon forgotten, what does affect the impressions we make and the relationships we hope to form and sustain? Proximity. Our social ecology matters. We tend to like those nearby—those who sit near us in class, at work, in worship. Our nearest become our dearest as we befriend or marry people who live in the same town, attend the same school, share the same mail room, or visit the same coffee shop. Mere exposure breeds liking. Familiar feels friendly. Customary is comfortable. So look around. Similarity. Hundreds of experiments confirm and reconfirm that likeness leads to liking (and thus the challenge of welcoming the benefits of social diversity). The more similar another’s attitudes, beliefs, interests, politics, income, and on and on, the more disposed we are to like the person and to stay connected. And the more dissimilar another’s attitudes, the greater the odds of disliking. Opposites retract. If proximity and similarity help bonds form, what can we do to grow and sustain relationships? Equity. One key to relationship endurance is equity, which occurs when friends perceive that they receive in proportion to what they give. When two people share their time and possessions, when they give and receive support in equal measure, and when they care equally about one another, their prospects for long-term friendship or love are bright. This doesn’t mean playing relational ping pong—balancing every invitation with a tit-for-tat response. But over time, each friend or partner invests in the other about as much as he or she receives. Self-disclosure. Relationships also grow closer and stronger as we share our likes and dislikes, our joys and hurts, our dreams and worries. In the dance of friendship or love, one reveals a little and the other reciprocates. And then the first reveals more, and on and on. As the relationship progresses from small talk to things that matter, the increasing self-disclosure can elicit liking, which unleashes further self-disclosure. Mindful of the benefits of equity and mutual self-disclosure, we can monitor our conversations: Are we listening as much as we are talking? Are we drawing others out as much as we disclosing about ourselves? In his classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie offered kindred advice. To win friends, he advised, “become genuinely interested in other people. . . . You can make more friends in two months by being interested in them, than in two years by making them interested in you.” Thus, “Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.” So, looking our best may help a little, initially, though less than we suppose. What matters more is being there for others—focusing on them, encouraging them, supporting them—and enjoying their support in return. Such is the soil that feeds satisfying friendships and enduring love. (For David Myers’ other weekly essays on psychological science and everyday life, visit www.TalkPsych.com)
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Social Psychology
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2,118

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11-01-2018
07:04 AM
Hate-fueled pipe bombs target Democrats. Two African Americans are gunned down in a grocery story. An anti-Semite slaughters synagogue worshippers. Political leaders denigrate and despise their opponents. In National Election Studies surveys, the percentage of Republicans and Democrats who “hate” the other party has soared, for both sides—from 20 percent in 2000, to near 50 percent in 2016. (Let’s make it personal: Would you want your child to marry a devotee of the other party?) Hostilities are poisoning the culture, and many Americans are wondering: How can we, as individuals and as a culture, turn a corner? Amid animosities fed by groundless fears, fact-free ignorance, and repeated (then believed) big lies, how can we embrace our common humanity and shared goals? As we social psychologists remind folks, conflicts lessen through contact, cooperation, and communication. Personal contact with equal-status others helps (it’s not just what you know, but who you know). Cooperative striving for shared superordinate goals—those that require the cooperation of two or more people—fosters unity (it even helps to have a common enemy). Ditto guided communication (an aim of www.BraverAngels.org, which brings together “Reds” and “Blues” to understand each other’s concerns and to discover their overlapping aspirations). And might we, individually and as a culture, also benefit by teaching and modeling an outlook that encompasses three virtues: conviction, humility, and love? Our convictions define what matters. We anchor our lives in core beliefs and values that guide our lives. Our convictions motivate our advocacy for a better world. They give us courage to speak and act. “We must always take sides,” said Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel. “Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” “To be silent is to be complicit,” adds Dead Man Walking author Sister Helen Prejean. But convictions need restraining with humility, a virtue that lies at the heart of science for theists and nontheists alike. Those of us who are theists, of whatever faith tradition, share two convictions: There is a God. It’s not me (or you). Ergo, we are fallible. The surest conviction we can have is that some of our beliefs err. From this follows the religious virtue of humility (alas, a virtue more often preached than practiced). A spirit of humility seasons conviction with open-minded curiosity. It tempers faith with uncertainty (faith without humility is fanaticism). It subjects our opinions to evidence and enables good science. It tells me that every person I meet is, in some way, my superior . . . providing an opportunity to learn. The triangle of virtues within which we can aspire to live is completed when conviction, restrained by humility, is directed by love. In his great sermon on love, Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted Jesus: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.” Doing that, he said, does not compel us to like our enemies, but does compel us “to discover the element of good” in them. By contrast, “hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe,” he added. “If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. . . . Hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.” Is this not a vision of a good life that will enable a flourishing culture . . . a life that is animated by deep convictions, which are refined in humility and applied with love? (For David Myers’ other essays on psychological science and everyday life visit TalkPsych.com)
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Social Psychology
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2,017

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08-09-2018
07:52 AM
Some years ago an NBC Television producer invited me, while in New York City, to meet in her office to brainstorm possible psychology-related segments. But a focused conversation proved difficult, because every three minutes or so she would turn away to check an incoming email or take a call—leaving me feeling a bit demeaned. In today’s smartphone age, such interruptions are pervasive. In the midst of conversation, your friend’s attention is diverted by the ding of an incoming message, the buzz of a phone call, or just the urge to check email. You’re being phubbed—an Australian-coined term meaning phone-snubbed. In U.S. surveys by James Roberts and Meredith David, 46 percent reported being phubbed by their partners, and 23 percent said it was a problem in their relationship. More phubbing—as when partners place the phone where they can glance at it during conversation, or check it during conversational lulls—predicted lower relationship satisfaction. EmirMemedovski/E+/Getty Images Could such effects of phubbing be shown experimentally? In a forthcoming study, Ryan Dwyer and his University of British Columbia colleagues recruited people to share a restaurant meal with their phones on the table or not. “When phones were present (vs. absent), participants felt more distracted, which reduced how much they enjoyed spending time with their friends/family.” Another new experiment, by University of Kent psychologists Varoth Chotpitayasunondh and Karen Douglas, helps explain phubbing’s social harm. When putting themselves in the skin of one participant in an animation of a conversation, people who were phubbed felt a diminished sense of belonging, self-esteem, and control. Phubbing is micro-ostracism. It leaves someone, even while with another, suddenly alone. Screenshot courtesy Karen Douglas Smartphones, to be sure, are a boon to relationships as well as a bane. They connect us to people we don’t see—enlarging our sense of belonging. As one who lives thousands of miles from family members, I love Facetime and instant messaging. Yet a real touch beats being pinged. A real smile beats an emoticon. An eye-to-eye blether (as the Scots would say) beats an online chat. We are made for face-to-face relationship. When I mentioned this essay to my wife, Carol, she wryly observed that I (blush) phub her “all the time.” So, what can we do, while enjoying our smartphones, to cut the phubbing? I reached out to some friends and family and got variations on these ideas: “When we get together to play cards, I often put everyone's phone in the next room.” “When out to dinner, I often ask friends to put their phones away. I find the presence of phones so distracting; the mere threat of interruption diminishes the conversation.” Even better: “When some of us go out to dinner, we pile up our phones; the first person to give in and reach for a phone pays for the meal.” “I sometimes stop talking until the person reestablishes eye-contact.” Another version: “I just wait until they stop reading.” “I say, ‘I hope everything is OK.’” Or this: “I stop and ask is everything ok? Do you need a minute? I often receive an apology and the phone is put away.” “I have ADHD and I am easily distracted. Thus when someone looks at their phone, and I'm distracted, I say, "I'm sorry, but I am easily distracted. Where was I?" . . . It's extremely effective, because nobody wants me to have to start over.” Seeing the effects of phubbing has helped me change my own behavior. Since that unfocused conversation at NBC I have made a practice, when meeting with someone in my office, to ignore the ringing phone. Nearly always, people pause the conversation to let me take the call. But no, I explain, we are having a conversation and you have taken the time to be here with me. Whoever that is can leave a message or call back. Right now, you are who’s important. Come to think of it, I should take that same attitude home.
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Cognition
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Social Psychology
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5,639

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07-19-2018
08:45 AM
Recent U.S. school shootings outraged the nation and produced calls for action. One response, from the International Society for Research on Aggression, was the formation of a Youth Violence Commission, composed of 16 experts led by Ohio State social psychologist Brad Bushman. Their task: To identify factors that do, and do not, predict youth violence—behavior committed by a 15- to 20-year old that’s intended to cause unwanted harm. Hélène Desplechin/Moment/Getty Images The Commission has just released its final report, which it has shared with President Trump, Vice President Pence, Education Secretary DeVos, and all governors, senators, and congressional representatives. The Commission first notes big differences between highly publicized mass shootings (rare, occurring mostly in smaller towns and suburbs, using varied legal guns) and street shootings (more common, concentrated in inner cities, using illegal handguns). It then addresses the factors that do and do not predict youth violence. RISK FACTORS THAT PREDICT YOUTH VIOLENCE Personal Factors: Gender—related to male biology and masculinity norms. Early childhood aggressive behavior—past behavior predicts future behavior. Personality—low anger control, often manifested in four “dark” personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism. Obsessions with weapons or death. Environmental Factors: Easy access to guns. Social exclusion and isolation—sometimes including being bullied. Family and neighborhood—family separation, child maltreatment, neighborhood violence. Media violence—a link “found in every country where studies have been conducted.” School characteristics—with large class sizes contributing to social isolation. Substance use—a factor in street shootings but not school shootings. Stressful events—including frustration, provocation, and heat. FACTORS THAT DO NOT PREDICT YOUTH VIOLENCE The commission found that the following do not substantially predict youth violence: Mental health problems—most people with mental illness are not violent, and most violent people are not mentally ill (with substance abuse and psychotic delusions being exceptions). Low self-esteem—people prone to violence actually tend to have inflated or narcissistic self-esteem. Armed teachers—more guns = more risk, and they send a message that schools are unsafe. The concluding good news is that training programs can increase youth self-control, enhance empathy and conflict resolution, and reduce delinquency. Moreover, mass media could help by reducing attention to shootings, thereby minimizing the opportunity for modeling and social scripts that such portrayals provide to at-risk youth.
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Developmental Psychology
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Social Psychology
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1,914

Author
07-11-2018
01:26 PM
“When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it; this is knowledge.” ~Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.), Analects One of the pleasures of joining seventeen scholars from six countries at last week’s 20th Sydney Symposium on Social Psychology was getting to know the affable and articulate David Dunning. Dunning (shown here) recapped a stream of studies on human overconfidence. When judging the accuracy of their factual beliefs (“Did Shakespeare write more than 30 plays?”) or when predicting future events (such as the year-end stock market value), people are typically more confident than correct. Such cognitive conceit fuels stockbrokers’ beliefs that they can outperform the market—which, as a group, they cannot. And it feeds the planning fallacy—the tendency of contractors, students, and others to overestimate how quickly they will complete projects. To this list of studies, Dunning and Justin Kruger added their own discovery, now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect: Those who score lowest on various tests of knowledge, logic, and grammar are often ignorant of their own ignorance. Never realizing all the word possibilities I miss when playing Scrabble, I may overestimate my verbal competence. Likewise—to make this even more personal—those of us with hearing loss often are the last to recognize such . . . not because we are repressing our loss, but simply because we are unaware of what we haven’t heard (and of what others do hear). To Daniel Kahneman’s kindred observation that we are “blind to our [cognitive] blindness,” I would add that we can also be literally deaf to our deafness. We don’t know what we don’t know. Thus ironically, and often tragically, those who lack expertise in an area suffer a double-curse—they make misjudgments, which they fail to recognize as errors. This leads them, notes Dunning, to conclude “they are doing just fine.” Note what Dunning is not saying—that some people are just plain stupid, a la Warren Buffett: Rather, all of us have domains of inexpertise, in which we are ignorant of our ignorance. But there are two remedies. When people express strong views of topics on which they lack expertise, we can, researcher Philip Fernbach found, ask them to explain the details: “So exactly how would a cap-and-trade carbon emissions tax work?” A stumbling response can raise their self-awareness of their ignorance, lessening their certainty. Second, we can, for our own part, embrace humility. For anything that matters, we can welcome criticism and advice. Another personal example: As I write about psychological science, I confess to savoring my own words. As I draft this essay, I am taking joy in creating the flow of ideas, playing with the phrasing, and then fine-tuning the product to seeming perfection. Surely, this time my editors—Kathryn Brownson and Nancy Fleming—will, for once, find nothing to improve upon? But always they find glitches, ambiguities, or infelicities to which I was blind. Perhaps that is your story, too? Your best work, when reviewed by others . . . your best tentative decisions, when assessed by your peers . . . your best plans, when judged by consultants . . . turn into something even better than you, working solo, could have created. Our colleagues, friends, and spouses often save us from ourselves. The pack is greater than the wolf. In response to my wondering if his famed phenomenon had impacted his life, Dunning acknowledged that he has received—and in all but one instance rebuffed—a stream of journalist pleas: Could he please apply the blindness-to-one’s-own-incompetence principle to today’s American political leadership? But stay tuned. Dunning is putting the finishing touches on a general audience trade book (with one possible title: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know—and Why It Matters).
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Social Psychology
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1,950

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05-31-2018
06:53 AM
How many of us have felt dismay over a friend or family member’s stubborn resistance to our arguments or evidence showing (we believe) that Donald Trump is (or isn’t) making America great again, or that immigrants are (or aren’t) a threat to our way of life? Sometimes, it seems, people just stubbornly resist change. Recently, however, I’ve also been struck by the pliability of the human mind. We are adaptive creatures, with malleable minds. Over time, the power of social influence is remarkable. Generations change. And attitudes change. They follow our behavior, adjust to our tribal norms, or simply become informed by education. The power of social influence appears in current attitudes toward free trade, as the moderate-conservative columnist David Brooks illustrates: “As late as 2015, Republican voters overwhelmingly supported free trade. Now they overwhelmingly oppose it. The shift didn’t happen because of some mass reappraisal of the evidence; it’s just that tribal orthodoxy shifted and everyone followed.” Those who love history can point out many other such shifts. After Pearl Harbor, Japan and Japanese people became, in many American minds surveyed by Gallup, untrustworthy and disliked. But then after the war, they soon transformed into our “intelligent, hard-working, self-disciplined, resourceful allies.” Likewise, Germans across two wars were hated then admired then hated again then once again admired. Or consider within thin slices of recent human history the transformational changes in our thinking about race, gender, and sexual orientation: Race. In 1958, only 4 percent of Americans approved of “marriage between Blacks and Whites.” In 2013, 87 percent approved. Gender. In 1967, two-thirds of first-year American college students agreed that “the activities of married women are best confined to the home and family.” Today, the question, which would offend many, is no longer asked. Gay marriage. In Gallup surveys, same-sex marriage—approved by only 27 percent of Americans in 1996—is now welcomed by nearly two-thirds. Consider also, from within the evangelical culture that I know well, the astonishing results of two Public Religion Research Institute polls. The first, in 2011, asked voters if “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” Only 30 percent of White evangelical Protestants agreed. By July of 2017, with President Trump in office, 70 percent of White evangelicals said they would be willing to separate public and personal conduct. An April 22, 2018, Doonesbury satirized this “head-spinning reversal” (quoting the pollster). A cartoon pastor announces to his congregation the revised definition of sin: “To clarify, we now condone the following conduct: lewdness, vulgarity, profanity, adultery, and sexual assault. Exemptions to Christian values also include greed, bullying, conspiring, boasting, lying, cheating, sloth, envy, wrath, gluttony, and pride. Others TBA. Lastly we’re willing to overlook biblical illiteracy, church nonattendance, and no credible sign of faith.” In a recent essay, I reflected (as a person of faith) on the shift among self-described “evangelicals”: The great temptation is to invoke “God” to justify one’s politics. “Piety is the mask,” observed William James. This tendency to make God in our own image was strikingly evident in a provocative study by social psychologist Nicholas Epley and his colleagues. Most people, they reported, believe that God agrees with whatever they believe. No surprise there. But consider: When the researchers persuaded people to change their minds about affirmative action or the death penalty, the people then assumed that God now believed their new view. As I am, the thinking goes, so is God. But the mind is malleable in both directions. Many one-time evangelicals—for whom evangelicalism historically has meant a “good news” message of God’s accepting grace—are now changing their identity in the age of Trump (with Trump’s support having been greatest among “evangelicals” who are religiously inactive—and for whom the term has been co-opted to mean “cultural right”). Despite my roots in evangelicalism, I now disavow the mutated label (not wanting to be associated with the right’s intolerance toward gays and Muslims). Many others, such as the moderate Republican writer Peter Wehner, are similarly repulsed by the right-wing takeover of evangelicalism and disavowing today’s tarnished evangelical brand. Times change, and with it our minds.
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Social Psychology
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Thinking and Language
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2,491

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03-01-2018
05:46 PM
In the aftermath of the mass murder at a Florida high school, gun safety advocates reminded us that countries and states with the most guns (which are also the places with the most “good guys with guns”) have the most homicidal and suicidal gun deaths. The United States, for example, has more than 300 million guns and a firearm death rate that is, per person, 46 times that of the largely gun-free UK. Unless we’re to assume that Americans are simply more malevolent, surely this has something to do with gun availability. If so, perhaps, to put this as gently as possible, some new gun safety legislation might be appropriate? President Trump offered an alternative idea—opening more mental hospitals that could house would-be mass murders: “When you have some person like this, you can bring them into a mental institution.” Florida Governor Rick Scott concurred about the implied feasibility of identifying high-risk people: “I want to make it virtually impossible for anyone who has mental issues to use a gun. I want to make it virtually impossible for anyone who is a danger to themselves or others to use a gun.” Although we psychologists might appreciate these extremely high estimations of our discipline’s powers of discernment, the reality is that these aggressors, though harboring anger, have mostly not had distinct psychiatric disorders and their acts are extremely difficult to predict. As one review of 73 studies of nearly 25,000 people concluded, psychology’s “risk assessment tools” have “low to moderate” predictive power. Thus, their “use as sole determinants of detention, sentencing, and release is not supported by the current evidence.” The Florida mass murderer, Nikolas Cruz, is a case in point. Although, in hindsight, it seems obvious that Cruz was a ticking time bomb, a mental health center had deemed him not a threat. True, he was angry and seemingly isolated and depressed, but so are a million or more other teen males—for whom the late psychologist David Lykken in his The Antisocial Personalities offers a tongue-in-cheek solution: “We could avoid two-thirds of all crime simply by putting all able-bodied young men in cryogenic sleep from the age of 12 through 28.” The impossibility of identifying, in advance, high-risk people with mental illness is compounded by the unfairness of a gun ban targeted at “mentally ill” people but not others. Who is mentally ill? A person with a phobia for heights? Someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder? An eating disorder? Obviously, society will need to look beyond psychology for gun violence remedies.
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Abnormal Psychology
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Social Psychology
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1,487

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12-14-2017
04:54 PM
In a 2016 post-U.S. Presidential election post, I wondered about Donald Trump’s expressed attitudes towards immigrants, ethnic minorities, Muslims, and women: Is he simply giving a voice to attitudes that are widely shared? . . . Or, with his public platform, will Trump instead model and serve to legitimize the demeaning attitudes, thus increasing their prevalence? Will he make bullying more widely tolerated? (Already, I have heard anecdotes of minority students experiencing harassment, but we need systematic evidence: Will intolerance measurably increase?) As the Trump rhetoric has continued—in August with the White supremacist marchers in Virginia whom he said included “very fine people,” and recent retweeting of inflammatory anti-Muslim videos from a British ultranationalist—my question has lingered: Does exposure to prejudicial attitudes from high places legitimize such attitudes? Is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s new report on “Hate and Extremism in 2017” right to presume that White supremacy and hatemongering is “emboldened [and] energized in the Trump era”? Pardon my hesitancy to assume, before having supporting data, that the answers to these questions are yes. Bullying and hate speech anecdotes are not new. Dylan Roof’s 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, massacre, for example, predated Donald Trump’s campaign travels and presidency. But now we have two new reasons to believe that the answers are, indeed, yes. First, new data from two large surveys and one experiment confirm our suspicions that hate speech is socially toxic. University of Warsaw psychologist Wiktor Soral and his colleagues report that “frequent and repetitive exposure to hate speech leads to desensitization to this form of verbal violence and subsequently to lower evaluations of the victims and greater distancing, thus increasing outgroup prejudice.” Second, as if to illustrate Soral’s findings, the U.S. FBI’s annual hate crimes report confirms that, yes, 2016 saw a 5 percent increase in hate crime incidents. Despite increased overall American acceptance of LGBTQ people, they—as well as ethnic and religious minorities—experienced an uptick in hate crime incidents. Likewise, the United Kingdom experienced a jump in reported hate crimes following passage of the Brexit vote, fueled partly by anti-immigrant sentiments. We should not be surprised. As social psychologists Chris Crandall and Mark White remind us: Presidents have the power to influence norms, and norms matter. “People express the prejudices that are socially acceptable and they hide the ones that are not.” So, I now consider my question answered, and the answer defines a task for us educators and social psychologists as we work to encourage a more just and compassionate world.
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Social Psychology
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1,771

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06-08-2017
02:35 PM
Each year when returning home to Bainbridge Island, a 30-minute ferry ride from Seattle, I skip the Space Needle and revisit the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial—the precise place where, on March 30, 1942, the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans began. (The island’s south end overlooks a security-sensitive narrow passage into a massive naval shipyard.) The memorial site has poignancy for me because my father was present that day, saying tearful goodbyes to his neighbors, whose property he insured and protected during their absence. And it has extra poignancy in 2017—the internment’s 75 th anniversary, and a time when similar fears are feeding targeted travel bans and increasing hate crimes. At the heart of the Memorial, a 276-foot-long wall represents the 276 interned islanders—most of whom were given six days’ notice to appear at the dock with one suitcase. Wood sculptures depict various individuals and families and highlight their stories—such as of the six soon-to-depart high school baseball players being thrust by their coach into the starting lineup of a game . . . only to lose 15 to 2. But no matter, the message was heard: These were valued teammates. The same spirit of inclusion was recounted by Nobuko Sakai Omoto, as she sat on her camp bunk and cried, knowing that “Back home at graduation they had thirteen empty chairs on the stage.” The islanders’ mostly supportive attitudes were rooted, first, in knowing their neighbors, but were also reinforced by local newspaper owners Walt and Millie Woodward. They editorialized: “Where, in the face of their fine record since December 7 [Pearl Harbor Day], in the face of their rights of citizenship, in the face of their own relatives being drafted and enlisting in our Army, in the face of American decency, is there any excuse for this high-handed, much-too-short evacuation order?” Throughout the war, the Woodwards, alone among West Coast newspaper editors, voiced sustained opposition to the internment, and published news stories of internees from the camps. After enduring some vitriol, the Woodwards were later honored for their journalistic courage and immortalized in the 1990s book and movie, Snow Falling on Cedars. At the memorial’s March 30, 2004 groundbreaking, former internee and Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community president Frank Kitamoto declared that “this memorial is also for Walt and Millie Woodward, for Ken Myers, for Genevieve Williams . . .and the many others who supported us.” At this Spring’s March 30, 2017 commemoration of that fateful day, the theme, once again, was the memorial’s “timeless and timely message . . . Nidoto Nai Yoni—Let It Not Happen Again.”
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Social Psychology
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2,603

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03-27-2017
08:25 AM
Here are three random scenes from University of New South Wales’ 19 th Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology, which recently assembled sixteen scholars from around the world to share their insights on “The Social Psychology of Living Well.” Roy Baumeister (Florida State & Queensland) documented the overlap between a happy and a meaningful life, but then identified separate predictors of a) happiness and b) meaningfulness. Bill von Hippel (Queensland) explored what evolutionary theory can tell us about our basic human needs—how humans have flourished in the past and are disposed to a good life today. Barbara Fredrickson’s (University of North Carolina) research has turned to examining the biological underpinnings of positive well-being and purpose. Other contributors: Yair Amichai-Hamburger (IDC Herzliya, Israel) reviewed the social consequences of today’s age of the Internet and social media. William Crano (Claremont) provided data from a large, longitudinal study of the associations of parenting with adolescent substance use. Elizabeth Dunn (University of British Columbia) presented her recent experiments on the social and mood consequences of people using vs. not using smart phones (while crossing campus, eating with friends, etc.). Klaus Fiedler (University of Heidelberg) offered an analysis of underlying adaptive principles pertinent to the good life. Joseph Forgas (University of New South Wales) was the conference host. He also shared his continuing work on the benefits of negative affect for human flourishing. Shelly Gable (University of California, Santa Barbara) described her studies of satisfying and meaningful close relationships. Felicia Huppert (Australian Catholic University) emphasized the contribution of mindfulness and compassion to living well. Sonja Lyubomirsky (University of California, Riverside), author of excellent trade books on happiness, spoke on the benefits of happiness and what contributes to it. Constantine Sedikides (University of Southhampton) described his creative work on nostalgia, as a positive experience. James Shah (Duke University) spoke on the regulatory pleasure and purpose of a good life. Ken Sheldon (University of Missouri) critiqued the sometimes ill-defined concept of eudaimonic well-being”and called for agreed-upon measures that define subject well-being. Jeffry Simpson (University of Minnesota) presented the latest data from a long-term study of how preschoolers’attachment and parental care predicts their health 30 years later. And yours truly presented the“religious engagement paradox”-- the curious tendency, on measures of happiness, health, and altruism, for religious individuals to be flourishing, but for lesser flourishing in religious places (countries, states).
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12-01-2016
07:54 AM
For us educators, few things are more disconcerting than the viral spread of misinformation. Across our varying political views, our shared mission is discerning and teaching truth, and enabling our students to be truth-discerning critical thinkers. We sometimes fail, and we do have our biases. Yet our charge, across our diverse perspectives, is to teach reality-based, evidence-supported thinking. Thus, we feel distressed when public understandings radically diverge from reality. Perception: Crime is rising. Seven in 10 Americans believe it, reports Gallup. Donald Trump echoed and reinforced that perception, arguing that “crime is rising” and in inner cities “is at levels that nobody has seen.” Hence, he argued, we need a get-tough response. Fact: For several decades, crime has been falling. In 2015, violent crime was less than half the 1990 rate. Since 2008, the violent crime rate, as aggregated by the FBI from local law enforcement, is down 19 percent. Property crime is down 23 percent. Perception: Many immigrants are criminals. Horrific rare incidents feed the narrative, as in the endlessly retold story of the Mexican national killing a young woman in San Francisco. Trumps’ now-familiar words epitomized the perception: “When Mexico sends its people . . . they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Fact: Immigrants who are poor and less educated may fit our image of criminals. Yet some studies find that, compared to native-born Americans, immigrants commit less violent crime. Perception: Unemployment has worsened. Especially in the Rust Belt states, such as Michigan where I live, many voters expressed frustration with the loss of good manufacturing jobs. “Our real unemployment is anywhere from 18 to 20 percent,” argued candidate Trump. Fact: It’s true that the national employment rate includes “underemployed” people—those who are without good jobs and who long for better jobs. Yet the good news fact is that wages are rising, some industries are facing a worker shortage, and today’s 4.9 percent unemployment is sharply less than during the recession-era doldrums of 2009: The Oxford English Dictionary’s just-announced word of the year is post-truth: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” A current New Yorker cartoon captures the post-truth spirit. Facing three contestants on the “Facts Don’t Matter” quiz show, the moderator explains: “I’m sorry, Jeannie, your answer was correct, but Kevin shouted his incorrect answer over yours, so he gets the points.” My misinformation examples are admittedly partisan (though several analyses, such as here and here, indicate that the top fake news stories of the recent U.S. election were similarly partisan). But the social dynamics that explain widely believed misinformation cross partisan lines. Thus in the United States in the late 1980s, most Democrats believed inflation had risen under Republican president Ronald Reagan (it had dropped). In 2010, most Republicans believed that taxes had increased under Democratic president Barack Obama (for most, they had decreased). Some misinformation is fed intentionally, for profit—“lies in the guise of news,” explained Nicholas Kristof in describing how Macedonian teens built fake news websites that attracted links, and advertising dollars. Nefarious motives, as in reports of Russian-planted fake news, may also have been at work. Other misinformation is a natural byproduct of the real news we’re fed. If it bleeds, it leads. In 2015, report David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg, six of the top ten Associated Press news stories were about gruesome violence. Thanks to the “availability heuristic” (our tendency to judge the frequency of events by how readily available they are in memory), it’s entirely unsurprising that Americans grossly overestimate their risk of being victimized by crime and terror. Biased information is additionally fed by the echo chambers of today’s social and cable media. As one who cut his eye teeth in psychological science with studies of “group polarization,” I am sheepishly aware of the extent to which most of us (me, too) tend to read blogs and Facebook news from those who think like we do, and to watch news programming (whether Fox or MSNBC) that supports rather than challenges our ideas. What a change from my youth and young adulthood, when news came from three centrist TV networks, and before today’s Internet-facilitated partisan tribalism. Mindful of this challenging reality, I’m supporting “Better Angels”—a new, ten year initiative aiming to depolarize America. It will take an enormous effort, given the ease and speed of spreading misinformation, and the way the Internet readily connects like-minded partisans and amplifies their shared ideas. But for us educators, the mission of alerting students to the social dynamics of misinformation, and teaching an evidence-based reality, has never been more important.
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10-27-2016
07:27 AM
Originally posted on October 27, 2016. Sometimes adversities become blessings. A defeat sparks a new resolve that produces a champion. A setback seeds a success. An adversity awakens a passion and purpose. (For me, the silver lining of hearing loss has been an avocational purpose as hearing advocate.) Such, writ large, is the life story of prisoner-turned-prisoner-advocate Dirk Van Velzen, whom I encountered a decade ago when he wrote from a California prison. I receive occasional letters from prisoners requesting copies of one of my books, or asking questions about them. But no prison correspondent impressed me more than Van Velzen, who asked perceptive questions from his reading of my Social Psychology textbook. Our ensuing exchanges enabled me to track his progress as a distance learning student, leading to his 2010 Pennsylvania State University graduation—while still behind prison walls—with a 3.99 GPA. This heartwarming journey, from “America’s Most Wanted” (for repeated burglaries) to honors graduate, is but the prelude to the rest of his story. Van Velzen was keenly aware that the educational opportunity he received, thanks to his father’s support, was unavailable to other able and motivated inmates. (Although prisoners can benefit from some forms of education, Congress in 1994 banned postsecondary Pell Grants to prisoners.) Undeterred by the magnitude of the challenge, Van Velzen created the Prison Scholar Fund to support other U.S. prisoners desiring higher education. With support from a handful of donors, including small grants from the Annenberg Foundation and our family foundation, and through the sale of calendars featuring prisoners’ art, the Fund has awarded 190 scholarships to 110 prisoners. Seattle Fast Pitch Presentation (courtesy Dirk Van Velzen) In recognition of his determined efforts, Van Velzen received a White House award for volunteer service—while still behind bars. (His good deeds notwithstanding, Van Velzen served his full 15 year term, without clemency or early release.) In the 17 months since his 2015 release, he has established a Prison Scholar Fund start-up office, housed at a Seattle Methodist church, and completed programs in nonprofit management and social entrepreneurship at the University of Washington and Stanford. When he pitched his vision in Seattle’s Social Venture Partners “Fast Pitch” competition, he finished first—and received $20,000 to help seed his program. On my recent visit to Seattle and to his office, Van Velzen showed me the bulging files of applications from prisoners seeking higher education support, and told me of the support he receives from his new board members, from University of Washington volunteers, and from Microsoft executives. The latter are assisting him in planning—if funding becomes available—a social experiment that will assess the long-term impact of enabling prisoners to do college work. DIRK VAN VELZEN (PHOTO BY DAVID MYERS) By painstaking sleuthing, Van Velzen and his volunteers found that, among the 74 scholarship awardees released from prison with the benefit of added education, only three spent time back behind bars. But does this remarkably low recidivism rate merely reflect a selection effect—the high quality of capable, motivated prisoners who would seek higher education? Answering that question requires—as any psychology student would appreciate—an experiment that randomly assigns matched eligible inmates to either a scholarship or no-scholarship condition, and then follows their lives through time. Should the impact prove positive, it would validate both his program and a fledgling government effort to restart prisoner higher education. Sometimes, observed Walt Disney, “A kick in the pants may be the best thing in the world for you.” Dirk Van Velzen kicked society. Society kicked him back. In response, he has become an example of how, in those blessed with gritty determination, adversity can ignite passion and purpose.
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10-04-2016
07:13 AM
Originally posted on July 7, 2016. In authoring textbooks (and this blog) I seek to steer clear of overtly partisan politics. That’s out of respect for my readers’ diverse views, and also because my calling is to report on psychological science and its application to everyday life. But sometimes psychology speaks to politics. Recently, more than 750 psychotherapists have signed “A Public Manifesto: Citizen Therapists Against Trumpism.” Its author, University of Minnesota professor William Doherty, emphasizes that the manifesto does not seek to diagnose Trump, the person. Rather it assesses Trumpist ideology, which it sees as “an emerging form of American facism” marked by fear, scapegoating, and exaggerated masculinity. An alternative statement, drafted by public intellectual David Blankenhorn of the bipartisan “Better Angels” initiative (and signed by 22 of us), offers “A Letter to Trump Supporters”—some arguments for rethinking support of Donald Trump. Social psychologists will recognize this as an effort at “central route” persuasion (offering reasons for rethinking one’s position). But in this presidential season, are rational arguments or emotional appeals more likely to sway voters—or some combination of both? What do you think?
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07-19-2016
08:03 AM
Originally posted on October 28, 2014. With nearly 5000 misery-laden deaths and no end in sight, Ebola is, especially for Liberia and Sierra Leone, a West African health crisis. It may not yet rival the last decade’s half million annual child deaths attributable to rotavirus—“Where is the news about these half-million kids dying?.” Bill Gates has asked. But West Africans are understandably fearful. And North Americans, too . . . though perhaps disproportionately fearful? Thanks to our tendency to fear what’s readily available in memory, which may be a low-probability risk hyped by news images, we often fear the wrong things. As Nathan DeWall and I explain in the upcoming Psychology, 11th Edition, mile for mile we are 170 times safer on a commercial flight than in a car. Yet we visualize air disasters and fear flying. We see mental snapshots of abducted and brutalized children and hesitate to let our sons and daughters walk to school. We replay Jaws with ourselves as victims and swim anxiously. Ergo, thanks to such readily available images, we fear extremely rare events. As of this writing, no one has contracted Ebola in the U.S. and died. Meanwhile, 24,000 Americans die each year from an influenza virus, and some 30,000 suffer suicidal, homicidal, and accidental firearm deaths. Yet which affliction are many Americans fearing most? Thanks to media reports of the awful suffering of Ebola victims, and our own “availability heuristic,” you know the answer. As David Brooks has noted, hundreds of Mississippi parents pulled their children from school because its principal had visited Zambia, a southern African country untouched by Ebola. An Ohio school district closed two schools because an employee apparently flew on a plane (not the same flight) in which an Ebola-infected health care worker had travelled. Responding to public fears of this terrible disease, politicians have proposed travel bans from affected African countries, which experts suggest actually might hinder aid and spread the disease. Déjà vu. We fear the wrong things. More precisely, our fears—of air crashes versus car accidents, of shark attacks versus drowning, of Ebola versus seasonal influenza—are not proportional to the risks. Time for your fall flu shot?
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