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Have psychologists found a better way to persuade people to save the planet?
In the 1990s, psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, developed a scientific theory to account for all the prejudice and violence in the world. Social dominance theory, which attributes sexism and racism (among other isms) to the way humanity organises its social structures, can be used to explain everything from opposition to welfare policies to why we go to war. Put simply, the theory states that people with power will always seek more of the desirable things in life (as they see it) at the expense of their subordinates. Today, researchers are applying social dominance theory to try to understand an even broader scope of behaviours.
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From cop to top psychologist
At the age of 18, more than 30 years ago, he joined the police force, attending to numerous cases such as domestic abuse and fights between gangsters. Today, Professor David Chan rubs shoulders with very different sorts, and moves in circles that saw him become in August the first scientist to be made a fellow in all six international associations of psychology. While his early and current careers might appear worlds apart, the 52-year-old psychologist at the Singapore Management University (SMU) disagrees.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of new research exploring: language, social categories, and sentencing decision making; genetic and environmental contributors to both math achievement and broader academic achievement; new statistical techniques for exploring links between birth order and personality.
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Episode 803: Nudge, Nudge, Nobel
Economists used to assume that people were, overall, rational. They may make mistakes now and then, but, if reasonably informed, they do the right thing. Then came Richard Thaler, who, in October, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. While Thaler was teaching at the University of Rochester, he had a side gig. Not a lot of people knew about it or took it seriously. He would catalog ways people behaved irrationally. And Thaler thought, there must be a way to make sense of this behavior, to understand it and to predict it. This list led him to psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
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Getting rid of the negative stereotypes — and biases — about aging
What can be done about negative stereotypes that portray older adults as out of touch, useless, feeble, incompetent, pitiful and irrelevant? With late-night TV comedy shows where supposedly clueless older people are the butt of jokes and with ads for anti-aging creams equating youth with beauty and wrinkles with decay, harsh and unflattering images shape assumptions about aging. Although people may hope for good health and happiness, they tend to believe that growing older involves deterioration and decline, according to reports from the Reframing Aging Initiative.
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Praising a Preschooler for Being Smart Can Backfire, International Study Finds
Telling a child how smart he or she is comes naturally to a lot of parents and early-childhood educators, but a new study of preschool children in China suggests that may do more harm than good. The study was published in September in the journal Psychological Science. It found that praising young children for their intelligence promoted cheating. A team of international researchers led by Li Zhou, a professor at Hangzhou Normal University in the Zhejiang Province in east China, conducted an experiment with 300 preschool children in eastern China. Half of the children were 3 years old, and the other half were 5 years old.
