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Which Direction Now? Just Ask the North-Facing Map in Your Head
You’re driving from work to pick up your kids at school. The drive is familiar; you’ve done it almost every day for years. But how do you know in which direction the school is from your home? Landmarks? The sun? Animal instinct? Now, a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, yields an alternative answer that surprised even its authors, Julia Frankenstein, Betty J. Mohler, Heinrich H. Bülthoff, and Tobias Meilinger, who collaborated at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, in Tübingen, Germany.
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Taking Another Look at the Roots of Social Psychology
Psychology textbooks have made the same historical mistake over and over. Now the inaccuracy is pointed out in a new article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. For generations, social psychology students have read that Norman Triplett did the first social psychology experiment in 1889, when he found that children reeled in a fishing line faster when they were in the presence of another child than when they were alone. But almost everything about that sentence is wrong.
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Testing Creativity
Widow. Bite. Monkey. What word goes with these three words? This is the kind of question that is asked on the Remote Associates Test, which psychologists use to study creativity. In a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists took a closer look at the test to see why people go wrong. (The answer to that question is coming soon, so think about it now.) People who have an easier time coming up with answers in the Remote Associates Test, or RAT, are generally more creative.
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A Gender-Biased Metric Guides Funding Decisions in Psychology Research
How do psychologists gauge scientific impact? One way is the so-called “journal impact factor,” or JIF, a ranking of a journal derived from the number of citations by other authors to all of the articles it has published in a given year. But JIF isn’t just a statistical abstraction. “JIFs are increasingly used to assess and predict the merits of academic work,” which leads to decisions about hiring, promotion, and the allocation of scarce resources to researchers, says University of Surrey psychologist Peter Hegarty. Needless to say, such a consequential measure must be as fair as possible.
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Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect When it Comes to Understanding Risk
People aren't very good at making decisions that involve risk. Many people are afraid of airplanes, although accidents are extremely rare; some people even drive to avoid flying, putting themselves at more risk. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how people learn about risk and finds that practice does not make perfect.
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People Mimic Each Other, But We Aren’t Chameleons
It’s easy to pick up on the movements that other people make—scratching your head, crossing your legs. But a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people only feel the urge to mimic each other when they have the same goal. It’s common for people to pick up on each other’s movements. “This is the notion that when you’re having a conversation with somebody and you don’t care where your hands are, and the other person scratches their head, you scratch your head,” says Sasha Ondobaka of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
