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‘I Knew It All Along…Didn’t I?’ – Understanding Hindsight Bias
The fourth-quarter comeback to win the game. The tumor that appeared on a second scan. The guy in accounting who was secretly embezzling company funds. The situation may be different each time, but we hear ourselves say it over and over again: “I knew it all along.” The problem is that too often we actually didn’t know it all along, we only feel as though we did. The phenomenon, which researchers refer to as "hindsight bias," is one of the most widely studied decision traps and has been documented in various domains, including medical diagnoses, accounting and auditing decisions, athletic competition, and political strategy.
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‘That Giant Tarantula Is Terrifying, but I’ll Touch It’ – Expressing Your Emotions Can Reduce Fear
Can simply describing your feelings at stressful times make you less afraid and less anxious? Researchers investigate.
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Brain-Computer Interfaces Are Changing the Way We Communicate
APS Fellow Niels Birbaumer, Professor of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, studies brain-computer interfaces (BCI). BCIs allow communication from the brain to an external device for patients who otherwise could not communicate through muscle movements to produce speech, gestures, or eye movements. Birbaumer was awarded the Wilhelm Wundt Medal, the Helmholtz Medal as well as honorary doctorates from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and Complutense University of Madrid. Watch Niels Birbaumer discuss his research on brain-computer interfaces in this series of interviews.
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Gender Equality Influences How People Choose Their Partners
Men and women clearly have different strategies for picking sexual partners, but the reason why differences exist is less clear. The classic explanation for these differences has been that men’s and women’s brains have evolved to make certain choices, but a new study in Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that evolution is only part of the answer. To be a ‘success’ in evolutionary terms, women need to have access to resources for raising offspring, and men need to have access to fertile females.
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When Do We Lie? When We’re Short on Time and Long on Reasons
Almost all of us have been tempted to lie at some point, whether about our GPA, our annual income, or our age. But what makes us actually do it? In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Shaul Shalvi of the University of Amsterdam and Ori Eldar and Yoella Bereby-Meyer of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev investigated what factors influence dishonest behavior. Previous research shows that a person’s first instinct is to serve his or her own self-interest. And research also shows that people are more likely to lie when they can justify such lies to themselves.
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OppNet Request for Applications: Basic Behavioral Research on Multisensory Processing (R21)
OppNet, NIH’s Basic Behavioral and Social Science Opportunity Network, announces the first of its two FY2013 RFAs: Basic behavioral research on multisensory processing (R21): http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-EY-13-001.html Application due date: October 31, 2012, by 5:00 PM local time of applicant organization. Purpose: This RFA encourages research grant applications investigating multisensory processing in perception or other behavioral and social outcomes. The FOA is intended to support basic behavioral research projects focused on two or more sensory modalities.
