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After Trump, Will Our Politics Get Better or Worse?
The potentially baleful consequences of a Trump victory in 2020 are clear. But what if, as seems more likely at this point, he is defeated? If Trump loses, a cloud will lift from American politics. But the circumstances that produced him will not vanish—and the changes that he wrought will outlast him. Like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, when Donald Trump fades from the scene, his teeth will linger after him—but unlike the cat’s, those teeth will not be smiling. They will bite and draw blood for years to come. ...
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Five Steps to Opening Minds
Admitting mistakes can be difficult — especially in a polarized society where certainty is prized — but learning to be intellectually humble may be key to fostering productive dialogue across the differences that divide us. Inspired by the need for such virtues, a team of researchers is now working to help communities learn to appreciate curiosity, open-mindedness, and constructive dialogue in a new, three-year, $3.8 million project led by Jonathan Haidt and Caroline Mehl. ...
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Groundbreaking UW Study: Transgender Kids’ Gender Identity is as Strong as That of Cisgender Children
Gender identity is as strong in transgender children as it is in cisgender children (those who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth), no matter how long a child has been treated as being a gender they don’t identify with, according to initial findings from a University of Washington study that is the largest of its kind. The results bolster earlier UW research that has found transitioning doesn’t affect a transgender child’s sense of self. ... This research is part of the TransYouth Project, led by UW psychologist Kristina Olson, who earlier this year received the Alan T.
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Can A Research Accelerator Solve The Psychology Replication Crisis?
The accelerator, which launched in 2017, aims to redo older psychology experiments but on a mass scale in several different settings. The effort is one of many targeting a problem that has plagued the discipline for years: the inability of psychologists to get consistent results across similar experiments, or the lack of reproducibility. ... The accelerator's founder, Christopher Chartier, a psychologist at Ashland University in Ohio, modeled the project in part on physics experiments, which often have large international teams to help answer the big questions. ...
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Why Climate Change Threats Don’t Trigger An Immediate Response From Human Brains
AILSA CHANG, HOST: So I turned to Dan Gilbert. He's a psychologist at Harvard, and he focuses on the human mind, not climate change. But it turns out those two things are totally connected when it comes to explaining why people don't do more about the environment. He wrote about this all the way back in 2006, but what he said then still holds up today. Gilbert argued that climate change lacks four fundamental features that typically trigger an immediate response. And those features all start with the letter I, so bear with us. ... DAN GILBERT: The human brain, you've got to remember, is a fantastic threat detector. The problem is that the brain is especially attuned to threats from agents.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on distortion in visual perception, how children learn spelling, and a replication of a study on predicting suicide attempts.
