-
Return Migration and Identity: Nan Sussman
Check out APS Member Nan Sussman of the College of Staten Island, The City University of New York in this WNYC segment: The Leonard Lopate Show: Return Migrations and Identity from March 16, 2011. Nearly a million residents of Hong Kong migrated to North America, Europe, and Australia in the 1990s; recently many of these immigrants have returned to their homeland. In Return Migrations and Identity, psychology professor Nan Sussman chronicles this global trend and explains why there is a unique relevance for Hong Kong. She’s joined by Byron Shen, a Chinese immigrant who came to the United States for his Ph.D.
-
Why Arguing Improves Students’ Reasoning Skills
TIME: American educators agreed last year that argumentative reasoning should be taught in schools when those in most states adopted the new Common Core State Standards, a state-led effort to establish educational benchmarks to prepare kindergarten through 12th grade students for college and career. Reaching a similar consensus on how to teach the art of arguing, however, hasn't been as easy. But a new study published in the journal Psychological Science could offer a solution in the form of dialogue. Researchers Deanna Kuhn and Amanda Crowell created a new curriculum for teaching reasoning skills that emphasized discussion and tested it on 48 sixth graders.
-
Social Science Palooza II
The New York Times: The nice thing about being human is that you never need to feel lonely. Human beings are engaged every second in all sorts of silent conversations — with the living and the dead, the near and the far. Researchers have been looking into these subtle paraconversations, and in this column I’m going to pile up a sampling of their recent findings. For example, Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim wrote a fantastic book excerpt in Sports Illustrated explaining home-field advantage. Home teams win more than visiting teams in just about every sport, and the advantage is astoundingly stable over time. So what explains the phenomenon? Read the whole story: The New York Times
-
Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries?
It's not just how free the market is. Some economists are looking at another factor that determines how much a country's economy flourishes: how smart its people are. For a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers analyzed test scores from 90 countries and found that the intelligence of the people, particularly the smartest 5 percent, made a big contribution to the strength of their economies. In the last 50 years or so, economists have started taking an interest in the value of human capital. That means all of the qualities of the people who make up the workforce.
-
Mind Reading: How Our Brains Predispose Us to Believe in God
TIME: Psychologist Jesse Bering is best known for his often risqué (and sometimes NSFW) Bering in Mind blog for Scientific American, which examines human behavior — frequently of the sexual sort. But he's also the director of the Institute for Cognition and Culture at Queen's University in Belfast and his new book, The Belief Instinct, examines an entirely different subject: why our brains may be adapted to believe in gods, souls and ghosts. How do you go from writing about sex to writing about religion? Morality is probably the common denominator. What does "theory of mind" — the ability to understand that other people have intentions and perspectives — have to do with believing in God?
-
Do You Have the Luck Factor?
Why do some people lead happy successful lives while other face repeated failure and sadness? Why do some find their perfect partner whilst others stagger from one broken relationship to the next? What enables some people to have successful careers whilst others find themselves trapped in jobs they detest? Is luck only for the Irish or is there anything “unlucky people” can do anything to improve their luck and their lives? Ten years ago, Professor Richard Wiseman decided to search for the elusive luck factor by investigating the actual beliefs and experiences of lucky and unlucky people.