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Brain, Behavior, and the Economy
Psychological science, once criticized for underestimating the impact of socioeconomic factors on psychological development and functioning, now plays a lead role in investigating how wealth and poverty affect thought, emotion, and action throughout our lives. Top researchers from the United States and Europe presented some of the most profound findings on cognition, brain, behavior, and development in socioeconomic contexts during the inaugural International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS), held in March in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
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CEOs Perceived as Moral Rally More Support
Some economists argue that a business leader’s primary responsibility is to maximize company profits and that the pursuit of any other goal, including contributing to the broader welfare, is just bad business. Consider a CEO’s plan to provide employees with free, healthy meals. On the one hand, the CEO could justify the policy on the basis of a moral obligation to care for employees’ health. On the other hand, the CEO could use a pragmatic explanation; the availability of meals will motivate employees to work longer hours. To get this plan off the ground the CEO must decide on the best way to justify this decision to stakeholders.
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Benchmark Project: Expert Online Survey Announcement
Expert members are invited to participate in an expert crowd-sourcing survey that seeks to establish benchmarks in working memory research. The Benchmark Project is led by Klaus Oberauer (University of Zurich, Switzerland) and Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol) and seeks to identify theory-relevant benchmarks in working-memory research. To date, more than 27,000 articles have been published on short-term and working memory. The plethora of publications not only provides a huge knowledge based, but it also presents an obstacle to principled identification of the core phenomena that are essential for theorizing.
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Framing Time in Days, Not Years, Could Spur Action Toward Goals
Measuring time in days instead of months, or months instead of years, can make future events seem closer and thus more urgent.
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Online ‘Mindset’ Interventions Help Students Do Better in School
Brief web-based interventions with high school students can produce big results in their schoolwork and their appreciation of a positive, purposeful mindset, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Two interventions, each lasting about 45 minutes and delivered online, raised achievement in a large and diverse group of underperforming students over an academic semester," wrote Gregory Walton, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University, along with his colleagues.
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Ambiguous Situations Make It Easier to Justify Ethical Transgressions
Two experiments show that people are apt to cheat in favor of their self-interest but only when the situation is ambiguous enough to provide moral cover.
