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The Power of Suggestion: What We Expect Influences Our Behavior, for Better or Worse
A lucky rabbit foot. A glass of wine. A pill. What do these things all have in common? Their effects – whether we do well on a test, whether we mingle at the cocktail party, whether we feel better – all depend on the power of suggestion. In a new article, psychological scientists Maryanne Garry and Robert Michael of Victoria University of Wellington, along with Irving Kirsch of Harvard Medical School and Plymouth University, delve into the phenomenon of suggestion, exploring the intriguing relationship between suggestion, cognition, and behavior. The article is published in the June issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Memory, Judgment, and Neuroeconomics—Insights from Current Directions in Psychological Science
Current Directions in Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, offers a unique perspective on developments taking place across the many different areas of psychological science. New reports from the June issue of the journal examine how people retrieve memories from their minds, a new model of how working memory works, how we judge each other’s personalities, and a multi-disciplinary field of study that merges behavior and economics. Retrieval-Based Learning: Active Retrieval Promotes Meaningful Learning Scientists who study learning tend to investigate how memories are formed during learning. But Jeffrey D.
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God’s Flipside: Religion Without Kindness
Huffington Post: I recently watched one of the most brutal and upsetting films I've ever seen, called The Stoning of Soraya M. I suppose the title of this 2008 film should have warned me away, but I really don't believe that anything could prepare viewers for the graphic, bloody and excruciatingly prolonged scene that gives the film its name. It's the story of a 35-year-old mother, falsely accused of adultery by her bullying husband and local mullah, who is convicted under Islamic law and executed by the men of a rural Iranian village. The stoning, based on a true story, took place in 1986, but the small-mindedness and hate-filled religiosity are medieval. The Stoning of Soraya M.
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The Big Reason Employees Need Bosses
BusinessNews Daily: It turns out that equality may not be the best policy … at least when it comes to work. That’s because a new study has found that teams with a built-in hierarchy outperformed groups where each person held an equal amount of power. The study found that groups with an equal distribution of power among all workers experienced more conflict, reduced differentiation in roles and less coordination and integration within the group. This is because, without a hierarchy of power, the researchers found that group members jostle for power amongst each other.
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Are Wider Faced Men More Self-Sacrificing?
Picture a stereotypical tough guy and you might imagine a man with a broad face, a square jaw, and a stoical demeanor. Existing research even supports this association, linking wider, more masculine faces with several less-than-cuddly characteristics, including perceived lack of warmth, dishonesty, and lack of cooperation. But a new study suggests that men with these wide, masculine faces aren’t always the aggressive tough guys they appear to be. “Men with wider faces have typically been portrayed as ‘bad to the bone,’” says psychologist Michael Stirrat. But he and David Perrett wondered whether the relationship between facial width and personality was really so simple.
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The Science of ‘Gaydar’
The New York Times: “GAYDAR” colloquially refers to the ability to accurately glean others’ sexual orientation from mere observation. But does gaydar really exist? If so, how does it work? Our research, published recently in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE, shows that gaydar is indeed real and that its accuracy is driven by sensitivity to individual facial features as well as the spatial relationships among facial features. We conducted experiments in which participants viewed facial photographs of men and women and then categorized each face as gay or straight.
