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How Friends and Personalities Mix
Researchers examine links between participants’ Big Five personality traits, their personality state when interacting with friends, and the quality and quantity of their interactions with friends.
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What To Do When the Boss is a Bully?
Leaders who view themselves as less competent are much more likely to act out aggressively towards their subordinates.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Reconsidering Temporal Selection in the Attentional Blink Patrick T. Goodbourn, Paolo Martini, Michael Barnett-Cowan, Irina M. Harris, Evan J. Livesey, and Alex O. Holcombe When two stimuli are presented in close succession, people often report the first but fail to report the second. In studies of this phenomenon, which is known as attentional blink, many items are presented in rapid succession and participants are asked to make judgments (presence or absence, report the identity) about two target stimuli (T1 and T2) appearing in the string of items. The time between the presentation of T1 and T2 is called a lag.
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Building Better Science Means Breaking Down Barriers
Many of the world’s most challenging issues – poverty, health behavior change, and globalization – are at their core issues that can be solved with a better understanding of human behavior. Making progress on solving these complex, multidimensional issues increasingly requires interdisciplinary collaboration across research disciplines. But the way most modern universities are organized, with behavioral and social science faculty splintered throughout dozens of departments, prevents scholars in one department from sharing ideas and resources with their colleagues from another department — even if it’s just down the hall.
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Going the Distance: Babies Reach Farther With Adults Around
Eight-month-old infants are much more likely to reach towards distant toys when an adult is present than when they are by themselves, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The findings suggest that 8-month-olds understand when they need another person’s help to accomplish a task and act accordingly.
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Cooperation, Fast and Slow
Working together isn’t always easy, especially when a stubborn supervisor or colleague is always putting their own self-interests ahead of what’s best for the group. When cooperation within an organization begins to crumble, productivity, morale, and profitability can all take a nosedive. Researchers have a long history of exploring what motivates people to cooperate – or not – and how to foster and encourage effective collaboration within and across groups. Psychological scientist David G. Rand (Yale University) recently took an in-depth look at some of the cognitive factors that influence our inclination to cooperate: intuition and deliberation.