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What Twins Can Tell Us About Who We Are
In December 1988, two sets of identical twins in Bogotá became test subjects in a study for which they had never volunteered. It was an experiment that could never be performed in a lab, and had never before been documented. And it became a testament to the eternal tug between nature and nurture in shaping who we are. This week, psychologist Nancy Segal tells the story of the Bogotá twins, which was a tragedy, a soap opera, and a science experiment, all rolled into one. And she explains why twin studies aren't just for twins. They can serve as a paradigm to understand age-old questions that affect us all: Is our fate written in our genes?
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What if we knew when people were lying?
In Season One of the TV show The Good Place, Chidi Anagonye, an ethics and moral philosophy professor, faces a dilemma when a colleague asks his opinion about a new pair of boots. Chidi clearly dislikes the boots, which are a garish shade of red and encrusted in crystals, but to spare his colleague’s feelings, he says that he loves them.
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Trigger Warnings Do Not Work, New Study Finds
Trigger warnings—those alerts provided to college students in advance of potentially disturbing material—have prompted an intense philosophical and ideological debate. But do they actually achieve their stated goal of reducing emotional distress when dealing with sensitive subjects? New research from New Zealand comes to a firm conclusion: They do not. "Trigger warnings are, at best, trivially helpful," writes a research team led by psychologist Mevagh Sanson of the University of Waikato.
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MacArthur Genius Recipient Jennifer Eberhardt Discusses Her New Book ‘Biased’
MacArthur Genius recipient Jennifer Eberhardt has a new book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think and Do. Jennifer Eberhardt is a scientist, a social psychologist who studies how we interact with one another. For more than two decades, she has been unpacking implicit racial bias, how our perceptions of race play into our everyday interactions, even when we're not aware of it. She's trained police departments and guided tech startups on recognizing their own implicit bias and how it affects their work. Now she's written about her research in a new book called "Biased: Uncovering The Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, And Do."
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Book Recommendation: “Biased” By MacArthur Genius Grant Winner Jennifer Eberhardt
I was thrilled to snag an advance copy of Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do (releases from Viking on March 26, 2019) by social psychologist Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt. This long-awaited book from the 2014 MacArthur Genius Grant winner -- whose research career has spanned Harvard, Yale and Stanford – proves to be an artful and compelling read. Eberhardt is best known as the world’s expert on the psychology of the “black-crime” association and for her wide range of approaches to studying how hidden biases infiltrate all parts of our lives (while our work is related, we know each other only by reputation and professional email exchange).
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Three research-based lessons to improve your mentoring
Some scientists are truly extraordinary mentors. Take, for example, professor Charlotta Turner, a chemist at Lund University in Sweden, who in 2014 received a text from her Ph.D. student telling her that he might not finish his thesis in time. When she learned that her student, Firas Jumaah, was in fact hiding with his family in an Iraqi factory as armed members of the Islamic State group roamed the streets outside, she leapt into action and worked with the university’s security chair to arrange a daring rescue operation. But for every heroic mentor, there are just as many horror stories about bad ones.
