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Seeing black and white makes people more judgmental
msnbc: Black-and-white judgments may be more literal than you might expect. A new study finds that people who view information on a black-and-white background are less likely to see gray areas in moral dilemmas than those who get the information alongside other colors. The background, which participants weren't aware was of interest in the experiment, did not push people to become either more lenient or more severe, researchers reported Friday (May 25) here at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. Instead, it took people's natural tendencies toward leniency or severity and intensified them — in other words, their judgments became more black-and-white.
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Behaviors We Don’t Know We Have – Insights from Psychological Science
Understanding human behavior – why and how people do what they do – is at the very heart of psychological science. New research presented in the June issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science examines the processes that underlie various aspects of human behavior, exploring how we learn patterns in language and vision, why some people are able to overcome significant life stressors, and how humans process reward and fear. Statistical Learning: From Acquiring Specific Items to Forming General Rules Richard N. Aslin and Elissa L. Newport Statistical learning is the process by which adults and infants extract patterns embedded in both language and visual input.
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Behavior Through Mathematical Modeling
Understanding behavior through Mathematical Modeling has been used to simulate everything from climate patterns to population growth, but Dirk Helbing uses them to examine something even more complex, namely human behavior. Drawing on his background in physics, Helbing developed the “social force model” to simulate the movement of pedestrians, whose behavior can depend on variables such as desired velocity and the distance between a pedestrian and other people or objects.
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Why You Should Smile at Strangers
LiveScience: Next time you're out walking about, you may want to give passers-by a smile, or at least a nod. Recent research reveals that these tiny gestures can make people feel more connected. People who have been acknowledged by a stranger feel more connected to others immediately after the experience than people who have been deliberately ignored, according to study reported here today (May 24) at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Motivation. "Ostracism is painful," said study researcher Eric Wesselmann, a social psychologist at Purdue University in Indiana. "Sometimes, colloquially, I like to say ostracism sucks.
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Red Mind, Blue Mind: Are There Really Any Independents?
Huffington Post: Many voters have already made up their minds about whom they will vote for in November. Indeed, for the reddest of the red and the bluest of the blue, there was never any doubt about how they would cast their ballots. But interestingly, as the country has grown more and more polarized over the past half century, more and more voters have rejected partisan identities altogether, choosing to call themselves Independents. Some polls put the number of Independent voters as high as four in 10 today, which means that the next president will be the candidate who captures the minds of this vast middle. But who are these so-called Independents?
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Why People Stick with Cancer Screening, Even When It Causes Harm
TIME: The data on PSA testing to detect prostate cancer has long been shaky — so much so that the discoverer of PSA (or prostate-specific antigen, an enzyme made by the prostate) himself decried the test two years ago as “hardly more effective than a coin toss.” He characterized the widespread use of the cancer-screening tool as “a hugely expensive public health disaster.” This week, the U.S. National Preventive Services Task Force concurred, officially recommending against PSA screening for all healthy men of any age. So why do people — particularly cancer patients and their advocates — continue to support the routine use of ineffective tests?
