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? ... View more

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? ... View more

Originally posted on November 25, 2014. The November APS Observer is out with an essay by Nathan, “Why Self-Control and Grit matter—and Why It Pays to Know the Difference.” It describes Angela Duckworth’s and James Gross’s research on laser-focused achievement drive (grit) and on self-control over distracting temptations. . . and how to bring these concepts into the classroom. In the same issue, I reflect on “The Psychology of Extremism.” I describe the social psychological roots of extreme animosities and terrorist acts, including a description of Michael Hogg’s work on how people’s uncertainties about their world and their place in it can feed a strong (even extreme) group identity. ... View more

Originally posted on April 2, 2015. Facebook, Google, and Twitter, among others, are enabling psychologists to mine giant data sets that allow mega-scale naturalistic observations of human behavior. The recent Society of Personality and Social Psychology convention offered several such “big data” findings, including these (some also recently published): “Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those of friends, spouses, or family.” That’s how Michal Kosinski, Youyou Wu, and David Stillwell summed up their research on the digital trail left by 86,220 people’s Facebook “likes.” As a predictor of “Big Five” personality test scores, the computer data were more significantly accurate than friends’ and family members’ judgments. (Such research is enabled by the millions of people who have responded to tests via Stillwell’s myPersonality app, and who have also donated their Facebook information, with guarantees of anonymity.) Another study, using millions of posts from almost 69,792 Facebook users, found that people who score high on neuroticism tests use more words like “sad,” “fear,” and “pain.” This hints at the possibility of using social media language analysis to identify people at risk for disorder or even suicide. Researchers are also exploring Smartphones as data-gathering devices. Jason Rentfrow (University of Cambridge) offers an app for monitoring emotions (illustrated here), and proposes devices that can sense human behavior and deliver interventions. In such ways, it is becoming possible to gather massive data, to sample people’s experiences moment-to-moment in particular contexts, and to offer them helpful feedback and guidance. Amid the excitement over today’s big data, psychologist Gary Marcus offers a word of caution: “Big Data is brilliant at detecting correlation....But correlation never was causation and never will be...If we have good hypotheses, we can test them with Big Data, but Big Data shouldn’t be our first port of call; it should be where we go once we know what we’re looking for.” ... View more

Originally posted on April 7, 2015. The April APS Observer is out with an essay by Nathan, “The Truth About Trust.” Drawing from the work of Paul Van Lange, it identifies principles of trust—as learned, socially received, reasonable, and constructive. The essay also offers three easy classroom activities that engage students in thinking more deeply about trust. In the same issue, my essay on “How Close Relationships Foster Health and Heartaches” suggests how instructors might engage students’ thinking about everyday stress and social support.  It then summarizes, from the work of Karen Rook, the benefits and costs of social relationships, and how relationships impact our health and well-being, for better and for worse. ... View more

Originally posted on October 14, 2015. I am just back from a fourth visit to China, where I enjoyed generous hospitality and have again spoken to colleagues and students in China’s fast growing social psychology field. My task was to speak at a Shanghai conference focusing on how the information age is transforming culture, in China as elsewhere. And what transformational change there has been in but a thin slice of history! The world now has nearly 5 billion mobile phone users (including more than 90 percent of the Chinese population—triple the 30 percent in 2005). And nearly 45 percent of humans are now Internet users (including just over 50 percent in China, compared to fewer than 10 percent in 2005). Of particular interest to social psychologists is the upsurge in social media. Although blocked in China (as is Google, YouTube, and the New York Times), Facebook now has 1.5 billion subscribers and in late August experienced 1 billion users in a single day—a milestone towards its mission: “to make the world more open and connected.” My mission in China was to review the benefits, costs, and research opportunities of today’s networked world. The net is shrinking the global village; connecting us with distant family, friends, and colleagues; enabling time-saving e-commerce and telecommuting; and giving us easy access to incredible amounts of information. Of particular interest to psychologists, the Internet is also becoming a vehicle for self-improvement, skills training, and even finding romantic partners. I admit to being surprised (see the data below) by how many people today find their allied spirits and eventual partners, enabled by the Internet (including my co-author, Nathan DeWall and his wife, Alice Rudolph DeWall). On the Internet, looks and location matter less to initial relationship formation, and self-disclosure and kindred attitudes and beliefs matter more. From Myers & DeWall, Psychology, 11th Edition, Presenting National Survey Data from Rosenfeld & Thomas, 2012 But these many benefits come with some costs. Anonymity can enable bullying and sexual exploitation. The Internet time-suck drains time from the face-to-face interactions for which we humans are designed. At its extremes, Internet addiction (including to gambling and pornography) may undermine relationships and productivity. Of greatest interest to me, however, is the Internet as echo chamber—its facilitating the self-segregation of like minds and the resulting group polarization. The Internet indeed has great potential to connect us, but also to deepen social divisions and to promote extremist views and acts. But what a boon the Internet is to us researchers, which I enjoyed illustrating from colleagues’ harvesting of “big data” from the archives of the U.S. Social Security system, the sporting world, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and national and world surveys. All this (plus the easier availability of diverse research participants thanks to www.ProlificAcademic.co.uk and www.mturk.com) is wonderful. But as Richard Nisbett reminds us in his new book, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking​​, “A very large N (number of data) may simply make us more confident about a possibly wrong result.” As he cogently illustrates, when it comes to discerning causation, big data archives, even with control variables and mediational analyses, are no substitute for the most powerful instrument in our psychological toolkit: the simple experiment. ... View more

Originally posted on March 21, 2016. The Sanders v. Clinton and Trump v. others debates offer, as do others, clashing arguments regarding free trade agreements: Anti-trade agreement argument: “Free trade” agreements, such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), benefit corporations at the expense of American workers. Competing with low-wage foreign workers means lost American jobs and lower wages. Pro-trade agreement argument: Ending free trade would raise the prices we pay for goods and would harm American companies (and workers) seeking to export products. The TPP eliminates many tariffs that other countries impose on American exports Social psychologists have offered another consideration. In the long-term, is an economically interdependent world a safer world? We know from social psychological research that sharing “superordinate goals” promotes peace., Muzafer Sherif’s classic boys’ camp experiments used isolation and competition to make strangers into bitter enemies. But with superordinate goals (restoring the camp water supply, freeing a stuck truck, pooling funds for a movie), he then made enemies into friends. Other research suggests that superordinate goals are not mere child’s play. From Amazon tribes to European countries, peace arises when groups become interconnected and interdependent and develop an overarching social identity (Fry et al., 2012). Economic interdependence through international trade also motivates peace. “Where goods cross frontiers, armies won’t,” noted Michael Shermer (2006). With so much of China’s economy now interwoven with Western economies, their economic interdependence diminishes the likelihood of war between China and the West (from Myers & Twenge: Social Psychology, 12th edition) What do you think: Is a world with free trade (rather than isolationism) a safer world? And here’s an ethical question: Whose economic well-being should we care more about protecting—Americans’ or everyone’s? To assess the extent to which people see themselves as “belonging to one human family”—an attitude that distinguished those who rescued Jews from the Nazis—social psychologist Sam McFarland developed an “Identification with All Humanity” scale, which is now supplemented by other measures of global human identification. What do you think: Should our circle of “moral inclusion” include all “God’s children”...or is it natural and appropriate to prioritize our national ingroup? ... View more

Originally posted on April 26, 2016. The April 11, 2016 TIME cover story on “Porn and the Threat to Virility” was replete with anecdotes of young men’s real-life sexual responsiveness being depleted by excessive pornography consumption. Really? I wondered. Is men’s capacity for arousal and orgasm with real partners reduced by their habituating (desensitizing) to the variety of streaming explicit sexuality? Is compulsive pornography-viewing literally a downer? Does it contribute to erectile dysfunction (ED)? If so, this is news worth reporting by us textbook authors, and would be a practical, nonmoral reason for encouraging boys and men to limit their hours in online fantasyland. Knowing that the plural of anecdote is not evidence, I turned to PsychINFO and found surprisingly little confirmation—and little research—on this socially important question. One new study of 434 Belgian university men found that “problematic” online sex viewing (and associated sexual self-gratification) predicted “lower erectile function.” This correlational study, though a good beginning, did not specify the viewing–dysfunction causal relationship. Call me a skeptic. But now the Skeptic Society has published an article by my esteemed friend Philip Zimbardo, with Gary Wilson, summarizing their respective new books, Man Interrupted (2016) and Your Brain on Porn (2016). Their arguments: 1)  Over time, online porn leads to ED. The explosion in easily available streaming online porn has been followed by a soaring rate of young male erectile dysfunction—from 1 percent of men under age 25 back in Kinsey’s 1950 era to one in four today. 2)  Across individuals, online porn leads to ED. Seven studies document an association “between online porn use in young men and ED, anorgasmia, low sexual desire, delayed ejaculation, and lower brain activation to sexual images.” 3)  Desensitization and conditioning explains it. The waning of real-life male sexuality occurs as preteens, teens, and young men become desensitized by compulsive pornography consumption. Like addicts, they come to need more stimulation and variety of the sort that a real sex partner “cannot compete with.” While masturbating, their sexual arousal becomes associated with pornography. 4)  But the effects are reversible. Benefits follow stopping use, including “clearer thinking and better memory, more motivation, increased charisma, deeper relationships, and better real life sex.” The debate has only begun. Skeptic Marty Klein, despite sharing “reasonable concerns about young people marinating in Internet porn,” finds their conclusions lacking empirical support. In response, Zimbardo and Wilson vigorously defend their conclusions. Surely the “porn messes with your manhood” claims will trigger much-needed further research that seeks to replicate or extend these findings (including to women viewers), and to control for confounding factors. Stay tuned. (For David Myers' other weekly essays, visit www.TalkPsych.com) ... View more