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How a Small But Vocal Minority of Social Media Users Distort Reality and Sow Division
Researchers at New York University have concluded that social media is not an accurate reflection of society, but more like a funhouse mirror distorted by a small but vocal minority of extreme outliers. It's a finding that has special resonance this election season. John Yang speaks with psychology professor Jay Van Bavel, one of the authors of the paper that reported the research, to learn more.
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The Big Idea: Why It’s OK Not to Love Your Job
A few years ago, I went to a retirement event for someone who, in his late 80s at the time, had spent more than 60 years as a professor at New York University. He had been embedded in every aspect of academic life, from mentoring and research to fundraising. Over the years he had managed to teach 100,000 students the university’s Introduction to Psychology course. Ted is one of those institutional pillars who can tell you what the place was like in 1965. These days, most people don’t last more than four years in one job. I walked into Ted’s party thinking it would be full of students and teachers, but I was wrong.
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Philip Zimbardo, 91, Whose Stanford Prison Experiment Studied Evil, Dies
Philip G. Zimbardo, a towering figure in social psychology who explored how good people turn evil in the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, which devolved into chaos after college students acting as guards started abusing other students acting as prisoners, died on Oct. 14 at his home in San Francisco. He was 91.
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New York Times ‘Modern Love’ Editor on What He Learned After 20 Years of Love Stories
Daniel Jones never dreamed he'd still be doing a New York Times column about love two decades and 200,000 submissions later. Or that the Modern Love column would have grown to include a podcast, books, live shows and TV shows in four countries. ... One of the most popular articles, opened by more than 75 million people, was called The 36 Questions That Lead To Love, based on psychologist Arthur Aron's experiment to hasten the process of falling in love by asking increasingly intimate questions to your date and then staring into each other's eyes for four minutes.
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New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science
A sample of articles on transmission versus truth, sensory-motor disorders in autism spectrum disorders, the diminished state-space theory of human aging, and much more.
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New ‘Unconscious’ Therapies Could Help Treat Phobias
If you’re terrified of spiders, a psychiatrist might suggest facing your fears through seeing pictures or getting close to the real thing—not just one time but over and over. For someone with arachnophobia, this sounds like a worst nightmare. ... Another technique, called “decoded neurofeedback,” or DecNef, involves coaxing people to produce brain activity corresponding to a fear without showing them the fear-causing stimulus itself.
