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People Use Emotion to Persuade, Even When It Could Backfire
People tend toward appeals that aren’t simply more positive or negative but are infused with emotionality, even when they’re trying to sway an audience that may not be receptive to such language.
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What It’s Like To Watch #MeToo When It Is You, Too
On average, more than 300,000 Americans experience rape or sexual assault each year. When the #MeToo movement makes headlines, those survivors are reading. How is that affecting people who have experienced sexual violence, to see stories similar to their own blasted across media outlets every day? Experts aren’t sure, but they’re confident that it’s having some kind of impact. Case in point: In the last three months of 2017, calls to the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network — a national crisis hotline for people who have experienced sexual trauma — increased by 23 percent compared with the same period in the previous year.
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John Cacioppo, Who Studied Effects of Loneliness, Is Dead at 66
She was a brain researcher and an authority on the scientific basis of love. He, too, was a neuroscientist, but with an expertise in loneliness. She was in her mid-30s, he in his late 50s. Both were wedded to careers in separate hemispheres — until they happened to be seated beside each other, serendipitously, at dinner on the last night of a neuroscience research symposium in Shanghai. Before going their separate ways, they left the restaurant together. A romantic full moon was rising over the East China Sea. He snapped a photograph. A few weeks later, she emailed him to request a copy (which she later admitted was just a pretext to resume their brief acquaintance).
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Judges and examiners get laxer with practice
Students are widely judged on their abilities before being allowed to enter top universities. Athletes are assessed on their physical prowess before being awarded medals. And academic papers, like those reported in this section, must run the gauntlet of peer review before being published. In making their determinations, evaluators study that which they are judging in a sequence, one student, athlete or paper after another, and apply standardised criteria. This approach is supposed to afford equal treatment to all.
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The Psychology Of Fake News
During the past two years, fake news has been a frequent topic of real news, with articles considering the role of social media in spreading fake news, the advent of fake videos and the role these play in the political process. Something less well-known, though, is that fake news has also become a topic of scientific investigation. --- As a cognitive scientist, one of the questions that most fascinates me is whether and how fake news affects people's attitudes and behaviors. This is a question for social science, with a particular role for social and cognitive psychology.
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Should We Pay Children for Good Behavior?
Hi, Dan. I’m raising two teenagers and have discovered just how hard it is to teach them to be polite, to clean up after themselves and to leave the house on time. Would it make sense for me to pay them for better behavior? —Billy Simple rewards may seem like a good idea, but they often have unintended consequences. Consider the case of Kelly the dolphin, who lived in a marine institute in Mississippi. To teach her to keep her pool clean, her trainers started trading her fish for any litter she collected. Kelly soon learned that litter of any size would win her a treat.
