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Failure to Replicate the Mehta and Zhu (2009) Color Effect
Mehta and Zhu (2009) reported several studies in Science on the effects of the colors red and blue over a series of cognitive tasks. Red was hypothesized to induce a state of avoidance motivation which would cause people to become more vigilant and risk-averse in a task. Blue was hypothesized to induce a state of approach motivation which would cause people to use more innovative or risky strategies. Studies appear in high-impact journals, like Science, often because they report novel or far-reaching effects. Such studies need to be replicated in order to determine whether the finding is reliable.
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How to Be a Better Boss
Scientific American: I took on my first “boss” role a couple of years ago while overseeing a tiny cadre of junior-level editors at a national women's magazine. The media industry isn't exactly known for having easy managers—ever read The Devil Wears Prada?—and I hadn't had any formal management training in my 10 years in the business. ... Psychologists who study management talk about job stress a lot because of all the ways it can affect a company: medical costs, sick days, morale and turnover. Time after time, researchers find that one of the most consistent ways to reduce stress among workers is to offer them a little more autonomy—a sense of control over their own job.
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The Problem with the Neuroscience Backlash
The New Yorker: Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the blood. That seems ludicrous now; through neuroscience, we know more about the brain and how it works than ever before. But, over the past several years, enthusiasm has often outstripped the limits of what current science can really tell us, and the field has given rise to pop neuroscience, which attempts to explain practically everything about human behavior and culture through the brain and its functions. A backlash against pop neuroscience is now in full swing. The latest, and most cutting, critique yet is “Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience,” by Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld.
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Beyond the Brain
The New York Times: It’s a pattern as old as time. Somebody makes an important scientific breakthrough, which explains a piece of the world. But then people get caught up in the excitement of this breakthrough and try to use it to explain everything. This is what’s happening right now with neuroscience. The field is obviously incredibly important and exciting. From personal experience, I can tell you that you get captivated by it and sometimes go off to extremes, as if understanding the brain is the solution to understanding all thought and behavior. ... The first basic problem is that regions of the brain handle a wide variety of different tasks. As Sally Satel and Scott O.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Edward Gibson, Steven T. Piantadosi, Kimberly Brink, Leon Bergen, Eunice Lim, and Rebecca Saxe Research has suggested that the default word order across languages is subject, object, then verb (SOV), so why have so many languages developed with a subject-verb-object (SVO) order? One explanation is the noisy-channel hypothesis, which supposes that individuals choose a speech pattern that gives the listener the best chance of understanding the original meaning of a message.
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Don’t Hurt That Robot! How Morality Muddles Perception of a Mind
LiveScience: Although people can't directly experience the consciousness of another, they take for granted that other people have minds — that others can think, remember, experience pleasure and feel pain. People, however, don't typically attribute such minds to robots, corpses and other beings with no apparent consciousness, except if these beings are put in harm's way, new research suggests. In a series of experiments by Harvard University researchers, people were more likely to ascribe the characteristics of an active mind to non-conscious beings when they were intentionally victimized than when they were unharmed.
