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Chicken Littles Are Ruining America
Sometime around 1970, the American personality changed. In prior decades, people tended to define themselves according to the social roles they played: I’m a farmer, teacher, housewife, priest. But then a more individualistic culture took over. The University of Michigan psychologist Joseph Veroff and his colleagues compared national surveys conducted in 1957 and 1976 and found a significant shift in people’s self-definition: A communal, “socially integrated” mindset was being replaced with a “personal or individuated” mindset.
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Exciting News from APS Meetings!
APS is excited to announce the merging of Annual Convention and the biennial International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS) and a new APS Global Psychological Science Summit scheduled for October 2024.
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New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on the psychology of erectile dysfunction, STEM engagement in informal learning environments, leveraging decision science, rethinking attentional habits, and much more.
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A Paradigm Shift in How Scientists Study Kids
There is an open secret in the study of child development: Most of what we think we know about how babies develop is actually based on a specific subset of kids—those born to families from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (a.k.a. WEIRD) nations. The acronym was first coined in an influential 2010 paper to describe the wildly unrepresentative populations that many psychology studies have long relied on.
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People Have Very Different Understandings of Even the Simplest Words
In 2017Kris De Meyer, a neuroscientist who directs the Climate Action Unit at University College London, ran the opening session of a conference on decision-making under uncertainty for an audience of scientists, finance professionals and policy makers. He divided them into groups of six and gave them questions and activities centered on their personal and professional experiences of risk. After a while, some hands went up. “They said, ‘We just realized we cannot agree on the definitions of risk and uncertainty,’” De Meyer says.
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New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science
A sample of research on intergroup attitudes, social drivers on digital media, the conversational silencing of racism in psychological science, what makes a group emotional, and much more.
