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Conflicting Cultural Identities May Foster Political Radicalism
New research suggests that dual-identity immigrants -- first-generation immigrants and their descendants who identify with both their cultural minority group and the society they now live in -- may be more prone to political radicalism if they perceive their two cultural identities to be incompatible. The new research is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Psychological scientist Bernd Simon from Kiel University in Germany and colleagues hypothesized that perceived incompatibility between the two cultural identities may pave the way for controversial or even destructive forms of politicization, such as political radicalism.
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The (Really Scary) Invisible Gorilla
The Invisible Gorilla is part of the popular culture nowadays, thanks largely to a widely-read 2010 book of that title. In that book, authors and cognitive psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris popularized a phenomenon of human perception—known in the jargon as “inattentional blindness”—which they had demonstrated in a study some years before. In the best known version of the experiment, volunteers were told to keep track of how many times some basketball players tossed a basketball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the basketball court, in plain view, yet many of the volunteers failed even to notice the beast.
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The Economy Could Also Be Making You Fat
Motherboard: Many of us know the feeling: We get depressed or anxious and the first thing we want to do is pig out. As noted on Motherboard a few weeks ago with regard to sugary drinks (and drinks with synthetic sugar), reaching for something sweet and feeling depressed may be something of a vicious cycle. But scary, depressing news about the economy, specifically, could make us more inclined to grab a Big Mac. This, according to a new study published in Psychological Science: People consume more high-calorie foods when they’re hit with messages that undermine their sense of economic well-being—nearly 40 percent more. Read the whole story: Motherboard
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Avoiding Cold Feet Down the Aisle
The New York Times: His charisma was big enough to make his bad habits seem small, more like quirks than flaws. The cigarettes on his breath; the extra weight around the middle; the indifference to clothing and appearances — surely these were minor things, correctable in time. ... “Virtually every big, real-life decision requires the decision-maker to resolve 10 fundamental questions, or what I call cardinal issues,” said J. Frank Yates, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Michigan’s business school. People only feel real confidence, he said, when they begin to address them all, including trade-offs and timing. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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Study links synaesthesia with coloured fridge magnets
Wired UK: A study of people with colour-grapheme synaesthesia -- where written forms are associated with particular colours -- has found that the pairings of colours and letters may be linked to playing with children's coloured magnetic letters. The research was conducted by Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer of Stanford University's psychology department and focused on eleven synaesthetes with strikingly similar letter-colour pairings which appeared to correspond with the letter-colour pairings of typical toy magnetic letters. Read the whole story: Wired UK
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Life in the Red
The New York Times: The belt-tightening was the easy part. Cancel the cable. Skip the air conditioners. Ration the cellphone, unplug the wireless Internet, cook rice and beans — done, and done. The larger problem for LaKeisha Tuggle, 33, who had lost her public relations job, was cash flow: After her unemployment insurance and savings ran dry, there was none. So she did some creative financing, juggling loans, credit lines, tax refunds and educational grants, to stay afloat — until a Sunday in September of 2011, when it looked as if the jig was up. She awoke to a foreclosure notice on her front door that announced her home would be auctioned in a week. “One week?” said Ms.
