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Yours or Mine? How We Handle Objects Depends on Who Owns Them
From scissors and staplers to car keys and cell phones, we pass objects to other people every day. We often try to pass the objects so that the handle or other useful feature is facing the appropriate direction for the person receiving the item, but new research shows that we’re less accommodating when it comes to handing over our own belongings. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “The associations or attachments that we have with an object leak into our movements in unintended ways when we interact with them,” says psychology researcher and study author Merryn Constable of the University of Toronto.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Development of Inequity Aversion: Understanding When (and Why) People Give Others the Bigger Piece of the Pie Alex Shaw, Shoham Choshen-Hillel, and Eugene M. Caruso It is traditionally believed that, as children age, they come to understand the unfairness of inequality and become less likely to endorse. The authors tested this idea in three studies, in which 4- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and the researchers determined how erasers would be distributed among group members.
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Stereotypes Skew Our Predictions of Others’ Pains and Pleasures
Every day, millions of people – including senators, doctors, and teachers -- make consequential decisions that depend on predicting how other people will feel when they experience gains or setbacks. New research looking at events ranging from college football games to US elections shows that our predictions about others are less accurate when we have information about the groups they belong to, such as which political party or sports team they’re rooting for. This research suggests that our reliance on stereotypes about social groups interferes with accurately predicting how others will feel.
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Paying Do-Gooders Makes Them Less Persuasive
People who receive a financial incentive to raise money for a charity they care about are actually less effective in soliciting donations, even when potential donors have no idea that incentives were involved.
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Motivating Eco-Friendly Behaviors Depends on Cultural Values
The specific cultural values of a country may determine whether concern about environmental issues actually leads individuals to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Backward Semantic Inhibition in Toddlers Janette Chow, Anne M. Aimola Davies, Luis J. Fuentes, and Kim Plunkett Studies in adults have suggested that backward inhibition, or inhibition of an initial stimulus, occurs when the next stimulus belongs to a different category of semantic representation (e.g., switching from the word "dog" to the word "sea"). Backward inhibition leads to inhibition not only of the previously attended item (dog) but also of new items semantically related to the previous item (e.g., cat).