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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds Marco F. H. Schmidt, Lucas P. Butler, Julia Heinz, and Michael Tomasello Children live in a social world, and that world has norms relating to behavior. Studies of how children learn these norms often explicitly instruct the children, indicating that an observed behavior is the "right way" to perform an action. The researchers examined whether children would naturally infer behavioral norms without explicit instruction.
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Lessons in the Delicate Art of Confronting Offensive Speech
The New York Times: As unlikely as that may sound to anyone who has heard the infamous 2005 tape of Donald J. Trump boasting about sexually accosting women to the chuckling encouragement of Mr. Bush, an “Access Hollywood” host at the time, it just might have stifled the celebrity billionaire. A body of psychological research shows that even mild pushback against offensive remarks can have an instant effect — as difficult as that can be, especially with a boss, a friend or a celebrity. ...
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How to raise a genius: lessons from a 45-year study of super-smart children
Nature: “What Julian wanted to know was, how do you find the kids with the highest potential for excellence in what we now call STEM, and how do you boost the chance that they'll reach that potential,” says Camilla Benbow, a protégé of Stanley's who is now dean of education and human development at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. But Stanley wasn't interested in just studying bright children; he wanted to nurture their intellect and enhance the odds that they would change the world. His motto, he told his graduate students, was “no more dry bones methodology”. ...
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Why You Should Break Up With Your Smartphone During Lunch Breaks
Scrolling through apps on a smartphone might actually sap cognitive resources rather than restoring them during breaks.
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How to raise kinder, less entitled kids (according to science)
The Washington Post: Maybe it was that time you took the kids to the amusement park, and on the way home — their adorable faces still sticky from the slushies you’d sprung for, their little wrists adorned with pricey full-day passes — they asked to stop for ice cream. You declined, and they yelled, “We never get to do anything!” Or the time you asked them to dust the living room after you had vacuumed the house, cleaned the bathroom, mowed the lawn and shopped for groceries, and they wailed, “Do we have to do everything?” Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Our Need to Make And Enforce Rules Starts Very Young
The Wall Street Journal: Hundreds of social conventions govern our lives: Forks go on the left, red means stop and don’t, for heaven’s sake, blow bubbles in your milk. Such rules may sometimes seem trivial or arbitrary. But our ability to construct them and our expectation that everyone should follow them are core mechanisms of human culture, law and morality. Rules help turn a gang of individuals into a functioning community. ... In a clever 2008 study, the psychologists Hannes Rakoczy, Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello showed systematically how sensitive very young children are to rules.
