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Want to Influence Support for Redistributive Tax Policies? Choose Your Words Carefully
Income inequality has become a major topic of discussion over the last year and yet consensus on what (if anything) should be done about it seems elusive. New research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that a simple manipulation of language might be able to influence support for policies aimed at addressing income inequality. Income inequality can be described in two ways: as the rich making more than the poor, or as the poor making less than the rich. The two descriptions convey identical information, but research has shown that the way in which inequalities are framed influences what we think other people ought to have.
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New Research on Perception From Psychological Science
Read about new research on visual and olfactory perception from Psychological Science. A Time-Based Account of the Perception of Odor Objects and Valences Jonas K. Olofsson, Nicholas E. Bowman, Katherine Khatibi, and Jay A. Gottfried There is some debate over how we perceive odor. Object-centered accounts of odor perception suggest that an odor is identified before its valence is determined, whereas valance-centered accounts suggest the opposite. Participants were presented with several categories of odors (floral, fishy, minty, and fuel).
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Music Makes a Brighter Future
Learning to play an instrument might lead us to feel more optimistic and motivated to seek opportunities, Michael M. Roy, Elizabethtown College, reported at the 24th APS Annual Convention in Chicago. In the spring of 2009, Roy and his colleagues established a fully functional concert band program in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. They returned in the fall of 2011 to assess the music program’s impact. During their initial and return visits, they measured feelings of self-esteem, optimism, positive affect, negative affect, motivation to avoid losses, and motivation to seek gains.
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So Much Training, So Little to Show for It
The Wall Street Journal: Companies devote a lot of time, effort and money to corporate training—with little to show for it. U.S. firms spent about $156 billion on employee learning in 2011, the most recent data available, according to the American Society for Training and Development. But with little practical follow-up or meaningful assessments, some 90% of new skills are lost within a year, some research suggests. Eduardo Salas, a professor of organizational psychology at the University of Central Florida and a program director at its Institute for Simulation and Training, has studied corporate training programs for more than two decades.
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Hot Hands and Hoops: Irrational Belief in the NBA
The Huffington Post: Professional basketball begins again next week, and dedicated fans will be happy to put last year's labor disputes and lockout behind them. But many will also remember 2011-2012 as a magical season. It was the season of Jeremy Lin, a New York Knicks point guard who, for a few weeks last winter, captured the country's imagination. Lin was an unheralded and undrafted bench player from Harvard, one of the few Asian Americans in the NBA, whose unlikely hot streak landed him on the cover of Sports Illustrated -- twice, back to back. He made headlines beyond the sporting press as well, from Time to the Associated Press, and was the subject of seven instant books.
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If you’re beautiful, you may be very average, study finds
The Globe and Mail: Call it the Beauty Pageant Paradox. A new article titled “Calling Miss Congeniality – Do Attractive People Have Attractive Traits and Values?” published in Psychological Science suggests that beauty and character are more mutually exclusive than we make them out to be. Researchers Lihi Segal-Caspi and Sonia Roccas of the Open University in Britain and Lilach Sagiv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem set out to explore how the notion that “what is beautiful is good” plays out in reality.
