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Jonathan Haidt — The Psychology Behind Morality
On Being: The surprising psychology behind morality is at the heart of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research. “When it comes to moral judgments," he says, "we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.” He explains “liberal” and “conservative” not narrowly or necessarily as political affiliations, but as personality types — ways of moving through the world. His own self-described “conservative-hating, religion-hating, secular liberal instincts” have been challenged by his own studies. Listen to the whole story: On Being
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Brief Periods of Auditory Perceptual Training Can Determine the Sensory Targets of Speech Motor Learning Daniel R. Lametti, Sonia A. Krol, Douglas M. Shiller, and David J. Ostry Do alterations in the perception of speech affect speech motor learning? To test this, the authors had participants perform a perceptual-training task that was paired with a motor-learning task.
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Virtuous Cycles: Night Owls and Early Birds
The Huffington Post: I have been an early bird for as long as I can remember. Even in college and grad school, when circumstances more or less forced me to be a night owl -- even then I secretly preferred being awake and alert as the morning dawned. You genuine night owls really don't want to know what time I'm up and about these days. Psychological scientists are very interested in "chronotypes" -- a jargony label for early birds and night owls. These preferences, or biological propensities, have important consequences, affecting school performance, work life choices, friendships, even romance.
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Using Your 5 Senses To Jump-Start the Creative Process
Fast Company: Sight might have the greatest impact on your state of mind while you're working. What your eyes take in around you will affect your creativity and focus. That means it can help to vary your lighting source depending on the type of work you're doing. If you need to be alert and focused, direct daylight is always your best option. A 2012 study published in Behavioral Neuroscience found that people who were exposed to daylight versus those exposed to artificial light for six hours two days in a row felt more alert, and performed more accurately on tasks. There's a link between light and cognitive performance.
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Thirteen in Years, but 10 or 15 in Thoughts and Action
The New York Times: Gather together a random assortment of 13-year-olds, and you’ll likely find yourself looking at a group of people who have only their age in common. Some will be way into teenage culture, into hanging out and hooking up, even into alcohol and drugs; others will be little changed from the children they were at 12, 11, even 10 years of age, still singing the songs and playing the games of children. The wide spread in young people’s rates of social and psychological maturation has led some researchers to propose that we think about adolescents not just in terms of their chronological age, but also their subjective age: how old they feel and act.
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Priming Gender Norms and Levels of Heterosexism as Predictors of Adoption Choices
In this study, my colleagues and I were interested in how priming gender norms and one’s level of heterosexism can affect decisions about which couple can adopt a child. We tested this by priming people with either gender normative or gender non-normative pictures. We primed a control group with nature scenes. After priming, we presented each participant with an adoption scenario in which they were asked to choose one of three couples to adopt a child. The three couples were a heterosexual couple, a same-sex male couple, and a same-sex female couple.
