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Disinformation Is the Real Threat to Democracy and Public Health
Disinformation is the coin of the modern realm. Vaccine denial, climate denial, election denial and war-crime denial have joined the grotesque denial of the Holocaust in the ranks of dishonesties now regularly foisted on the public. We can, however, do something about this crisis of the information age. In January the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranked the spread of misinformation among the greatest threats to humanity in its Global Risks Report. With more than four billion people voting in the upcoming 2024 elections (roughly half the world’s population), the report makes clear that now is the time to prepare the world against disinformation and those who peddle it. ...
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Simine Vazire Hopes to Fix Psychology’s Credibility Crisis
... A movement to try to fix things began more than a decade ago. Now, one of its leading lights has ascended to one of the most powerful positions in the field. On January 1st Simine Vazire took over as editor-in-chief of Psychological Science, the discipline’s most prestigious journal. Dr Vazire is a psychologist at the University of Melbourne who helps run a research group focused on metascience, or the study of science’s processes. She has been a mainstay of the movement to fix psychological science for years.
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Bilingualism Is Reworking This Language’s Rainbow
Like the ancient Greek of Homer's time, the Tsimane' language has no set word for the parts of the color spectrum English speakers call “blue.” Although Tsimane' does name a number of more subjective hues (think “aquamarine” or “mauve” in English), its speakers—the Tsimane' people of Bolivia—reliably agree on just three main color categories: blackish, reddish and whitish. But bilingualism is reworking the Tsimane' tricolor rainbow, researchers recently reported in Psychological Science—offering a rare, real-time glimpse into how learning a second language can change how people think about abstract concepts and fuel language evolution.
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New Year’s Resolutions for the Anxious
The start of the new year often brings lofty ambitions. It’s 2024 — time to exercise and eat better, says a nagging voice, somewhere deep in your brain. What about learning to knit? It’s enough to make anyone feel anxious. For those who already struggle with anxiety, these heightened expectations can be even more distressing. Especially because research suggests that many of us don’t complete our New Year’s resolutions. So we asked several psychologists for resolutions specifically tailored to people with anxious tendencies. And we broke them down into bite-size steps so you can notch your successes along the way. But don’t feel pressure to tackle these tips just because it’s January.
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Where Do Feelings Come From?
We often assume that our feelings are responses to the world around us. A friend gives you a fun gift, you feel joy. A driver cuts you off in traffic, you feel frustration. But what if our emotions are actually predictions? This week on the show, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains how we manufacture our own feelings. ...
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Why We Split the World Into Good and Evil — And Make Decisions We Regret
Humans carve the world cleanly in two when they feel threatened. There’s a right and a wrong, a good and an evil, an us and a them. In normal times, this behavior is most obvious in people with serious depression or borderline personality disorder. Psychologists call it “splitting.” ...
