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For Black Professional Men, It’s Who You Are, Not Who You Know
President Obama last week announced a new public-private initiative aimed at giving young minority men better opportunities — as long as they “work hard” and “take responsibility.” Indeed, those qualities tend to be more critical to the success of African American men than they are for other groups, who appear better able to leverage social and professional contacts to get ahead. Studies have shown that social capital — defined as one’s professional network — is a big factor in career advancement. But those studies focused largely on Caucasians. As a recent study shows, networking seems to be less of a factor in Black men's career accomplishments than are education and motivation.
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The Nature of Culture
Douglas Medin has explored scientific reasoning in children and adults across cultures, as well as across urban versus rural populations. His research also has focused on what is known as commons behavior. This line of inquiry asks why certain populations do or don’t destroy a shared environment to fulfill selfish needs. His research teams have studied indigenous Mayan populations and found that they share natural resources without draining them, largely because they develop a rich, spiritual understanding of forest ecology. Medin’s work has helped move psychological science beyond laboratory models to a broader focus on how our cultural background influences our view of the world.
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Feats of Memory at the 2014 APS Annual Convention
It’s not a supernatural power: Memorizing a deck of cards in less than a minute and a 300-word list in just a quarter of an hour are achievable feats for top memory athletes. At the 2014 APS Annual Convention, May 22–25 in San Francisco, attendees will have the chance to see one such memory athlete in action. Nelson Dellis, the 2012 US Memory Champion, will speak with APS Past President Henry L. Roediger, III, as part of Roediger’s Bring the Family Address, “Make It Stick: How Memory Athletes Perform and How Their Techniques Can Help You.” Roediger, a leader in cognitive psychology, has spent his career studying memory retrieval and its implications for memory and learning.
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Young Children Form First Impressions From Faces
Just like adults, children as young as 3 tend to judge an individual’s character traits, such as trustworthiness and competence, simply by looking at the person’s face, new research shows. And they show remarkable consensus in the judgments they make, the findings suggest. The research, led by psychological scientist Emily Cogsdill of Harvard University, shows that the predisposition to judge others based on physical features starts early in childhood and does not require years of social experience. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Far-Out Thinking: Generating Solutions to Distant Analogies Promotes Relational Thinking Michael S. Vendetti, Aaron Wu, and Keith J. Holyoak The authors examined whether inducing a general mindset using a verbal-analogy task would promote more abstract thinking on a subsequent unrelated reasoning task. Participants solved analogies with near or far semantic relations, either by indicating whether the analogy was valid or invalid or by generating a valid completion for an incomplete analogy. Participants then completed a picture-mapping task that used unrelated materials.
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Burnout Comes in Three Varieties
As of this month, more than 10 million people in the United States are unemployed, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Given that there are so many people looking for jobs, it’s curious that a large percentage of American workers want nothing more than to quit. As of this past December, 1.7% of all employed people left their jobs. That rate has been climbing -- albeit slowly -- since 2009. “Burnout syndrome” -- that is, the fatigue, cynicism, and professional inefficacy that comes with work-related stress -- may play a significant role in this trend. Some level of stress is an inevitable part of every work experience. But at what point do those stressors become overbearing?
