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The Nature/Nurture Mixture
The nature/nurture interaction is a vibrant and important field of study in behavioral science. Terrie Moffitt has focused her research on how genes and environment can, in certain combinations, spur antisocial and criminal behaviors. Her groundbreaking research, in collaboration with psychological scientist Avshalom Caspi, showed that individuals with a specific genotype are more vulnerable to developing antisocial and violent behavior if they are mistreated during childhood. She’s also linked another genotype to a risk for depression in the wake of stressful life events. Watch Terrie Moffitt's keynote address at the inaugural International Convention of Psychological Science.
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The Science of Addiction
Growing up in poor urban neighborhood, Carl Hart watched crack cocaine ravage the lives of his relatives. Early in his research career, Hart set out to find a neurological cure for chemical addiction. But as he began studying addicts, he found that there was more at issue than the neurochemical properties of the illicit drugs.
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Ways of Remembering
Larry Jacoby is one of the world’s foremost researchers on memory — specifically on the difference between conscious and automatic memory. The distinction is useful for better understanding age-related differences in memory performance. His studies reveal, for example, that our ability to recall specific events declines as we age, spurring us to rely on unconscious, automatic memories. These unconscious influences can be misleading, often tricking people into remembering events that never really occurred. In addition to further refining theory about memory, one of Jacoby’s fundamental research goals is to develop procedures for the diagnosis and treatment of memory deficits.
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Children’s Language Advantage
Why are children more successful at learning a new language compared to adults? Elissa Newport has devoted her career to studying human language acquisition, including the learning differences between children and adults. In her “less-is-more” hypothesis, she posits that children are better able than adults to learn languages because, paradoxically, they have fewer cognitive resources available to them.
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The Nature of Culture
Douglas Medin has explored scientific reasoning in children and adults across cultures, as well as across urban versus rural populations. His research also has focused on what is known as commons behavior. This line of inquiry asks why certain populations do or don’t destroy a shared environment to fulfill selfish needs. His research teams have studied indigenous Mayan populations and found that they share natural resources without draining them, largely because they develop a rich, spiritual understanding of forest ecology. Medin’s work has helped move psychological science beyond laboratory models to a broader focus on how our cultural background influences our view of the world.
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Inferring Missing Information
Every day people make judgments and decisions, even when they don’t have the necessary information. Ramadhar Singh studied how people, when making predictions about others, infer the missing information from the facts they do have. In his research, Singh first experimentally demonstrated that Predicted gift size = Generosity x Capability (Income). Based on this evidence, he then identified that inferred value of the missing capability information increases with the given value of generosity information. In contrast, inferred value of the missing generosity information is constant usually around the middle level of generosity in the donor.
