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Opposites Don’t Attract (And That’s Bad News)
Wired: Opposites attract. Although we love to repeat this optimistic cliche about human natures, decades of psychological research have demonstrated that the trusim isn’t true. Rather, people seek out people who are just like them. This is known as the similarity-attraction effect, or SAE. Although there is slight variation in the strength of the effect, the SAE has been shown to exist in nearly every culture, from Western Europe to the remote tribes of the Brazilian rainforest. It doesn’t matter where we live or how we grew up or which language we speak – we still want to spend time with people who feel similar. It’s simply more comfortable.
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APSSC Award Winners Talk About Identity and Race
Eighty-three years after the birth Martin Luther King, Jr., psychological scientists continue to investigate race, cultural identity, and prejudice. Three APSSC Award presentations at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC addressed how these factors influence health and social interaction. Watch Sabrica Barnett (The City University of New York), Bryan Jensen (Brigham Young University), and Lillian Polanco (Hunter College) present their research. Designing effective methods to combat prejudice is still a challenge for researchers. To learn more, read Wray Herbert’s blog on the problem with “colorblindness” or recent research on anti-prejudice messages from Psychological Science.
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What Do Polar Bears and Social Faux Pas Have in Common?
Scientific American: Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a psychological goldmine. If you can think it, chances are he wrote about it. But as far as I know, only once has his writing directly inspired psychological research—and it was his non-fiction at that. Specifically, his reminiscences of travels to the European continent, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. One chapter in particular, “An Essay Concerning the Bourgeois,” has sparked some of the most prominent social psychology research of the last twenty years: Daniel Wegner’s studies of thought suppression.
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The story of the self
The Guardian: Memory is our past and future. To know who you are as a person, you need to have some idea of who you have been. And, for better or worse, your remembered life story is a pretty good guide to what you will do tomorrow. "Our memory is our coherence," wrote the surrealist Spanish-born film-maker, Luis Buñuel, "our reason, our feeling, even our action." Lose your memory and you lose a basic connection with who you are. It's no surprise, then, that there is fascination with this quintessentially human ability.
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How Do You Get Doctors to Wash Their Hands?
Huffington Post: The field of medicine has understood the importance of hand washing for almost 200 years. The Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis found that when people in an obstetric clinic washed their hands, incidence of infections plummeted. These days, hospitals have signs all over that remind patients and staff to wash their hands at every opportunity. The fact that you need signs, though, suggests that not everyone is washing their hands all the time. What kinds of signs are likely to be most effective? Lots of research on persuasion suggests that a good message is one that requires people to take individual responsibility for their own personal consequences.
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Want to Feel Taller? Become the Boss
Science: French president Nicolas Sarkozy (right) is only 5'5'' (1.65 meters), but he might not even be aware of it (although his raised heels speak otherwise). That's because power makes people feel taller than they really are, according to a new study. Researchers asked 49 volunteers to write about a time when they were in a position where they held authority over others, while another 49 were told to write about being in a submissive position. Then the researchers had the participants create avatars for themselves in a video game. Read the whole story: Science
