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Smartphones Don’t Make Us Dumb
The New York Times: AS much as we love our digital devices, many of us have an uneasy sense that they are destroying our attention spans. We skitter from app to app, seldom alighting for long. Our ability to concentrate is shot, right? Research shows that our intuition is wrong. We can focus. But our sense that we can’t may not be a phantom. Paying attention requires not just ability but desire. Technology may snuff out our desire to focus. The idea that gadgets corrode our attention span sounds logical.
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Paying Attention Doesn’t Mean You’ll Remember What You Saw
We can forget a piece of information just seconds after having used it to make a judgment if we don’t have expectations of using it in the future, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. This finding, which has been named “attribute amnesia,” indicates that memory is far more selective than previously thought. "It is commonly believed that you will remember specific details about the things you're attending to, but our experiments show that this is not necessarily true," said researcher Brad Wyble, assistant professor of psychology at Penn State.
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Unraveling Mysteries of Safe Steering with Behavioral Science
We may take it for granted, but exactly how we steer a car has remained a mystery to researchers for nearly 70 years. The prevailing theory for how we steer towards a target was initially developed by British researcher Arnold Tustin in 1947. Tustin was a pioneer in the engineering field of control theory which focuses on the interactions between humans and complex machines.
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It’s Crazy How Easy It Is to Make People Falsely Remember Committing a Crime
New York Magazine: Memory's a pretty fluid and complex thing. We don't always remember specific details of an event well, and what details we do remember can be influenced by stuff that happened after the event itself. This is all pretty standard when it comes to memory research. What the authors of a new paper in Psychological Science just pulled off, though, takes things to a whole new level: They were able to convince study participants they had committed a crime that was completely fabricated.
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Love is … getting the answers to all these 36 questions right
The Guardian: The 36 questions that can make you “fall in love with anyone” were first published in 1997, in an academic paper by psychologist Arthur Aron and others, under the title The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings. The questions appeared in the appendix, along with the instructions that the team had given each pair, which began “This is a study of interpersonal closeness, and your task, which we think will be quite enjoyable, is simply to get close to your partner.” Participants were told to work their way through the questions in order, each answering all 36 questions, over a period of about an hour.
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The Psychological Reason ‘Billie Jean’ Kills at Weddings
The Atlantic: “… Baby, One More Time” is not a good song. You could make a convincing argument, in fact, that it is an actively terrible song: devoid of musical merit, underdeveloped, overproduced, eroding our collective IQs one oh, baby, baby at a time—a notable roadblock, basically, on humanity’s long march toward the hazy destination of Progress. And yet: I love “… Baby, One More Time” with the kind of mindless devotion I normally reserve for family, friends, and late-night Taco Bell.
