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Dusting for Fingerprints – It Ain’t CSI
Fingerprints – dozens of crime dramas revolve around them. The investigators find the victim, dust for fingerprints, run them through a computer program and -voilá- the guilty party is quickly identified and sent to prison. If only it were that easy. The reality is that this common but crucial part of an investigation is done by humans, not by computers. An upcoming study in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveals that the human factor in the process could lead to errors and false convictions of innocent people.
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Is Your Child a Brat? Use Rewards, Not Punishment
Big Think: The idea that punishment teaches a kid not to misbehave is a myth, pure and simple. Here are three steps for actually changing your kid's unpleasant behavior. Punishment--mild, severe, abusive--changes behavior only at the moment it is delivered. It doesn’t change the overall level or rate of the behavior. So if you have a child that is doing something horrible and you smack them, it’ll stop it for the moment, but it won’t decrease the number of times they do the horrible thing. Watch the video: Big Think
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You’re Rubber, I’m Glue – How Can I Impress You?
Would you rather be a professor or his dependent student? We tend to think being a dependent person isn’t a good thing, but new research has found some positive aspects of dependency. An article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science explains that dependent people have a need to impress others, which leads to active, not passive, behavior. In one study, a dependent and non-dependent volunteer, as measured on a personality test, were paired up to debate an issue the researchers knew they didn’t agree on. Although the researchers expected the dependent person to give in, they found that 70 percent of the time it was actually the nondependent volunteer who gave in.
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Psychologists Discover We’ve Been Underestimating the Unconscious Mind
What does consciousness do? Theories vary, but most neurologists and cognitive psychologists agree that we need awareness for integration. That is, unconscious processing can take in one object or word at a time. But when it comes to pulling together disparate stimuli into a coherent, complex scene, consciousness gets to work. Now, new research by four Israeli psychologists—Liad Mudrik and Dominique Lamy of Tel Aviv University, and Assaf Breska and Leon Y. Deouell of Hebrew University of Jerusalem—suggests that scientists have been underestimating the abilities of the unconscious mind. “Integration can happen even when we’re unaware of the stimulus,” says Mudrik.
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On 9/11, Americans may not have been as angry as you thought they were
The Financial: On September 11, 2001, the air was sizzling with anger—and the anger got hotter as the hours passed. That, anyway, was one finding of a 2010 analysis by Mitja Back, Albrecht Küfner, and Boris Egloff of 85,000 pager messages sent that day. The researchers employed a commonly used tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, or LIWC, which teases out information from the frequency of word usages in texts. But were Americans really so angry? Clemson University psychologist Cynthia L. S. Pury wasn't out to answer that question when she made the discovery that was just published online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Psychologists Put “Character” Under the Microscope–and it Vanishes
Scientific American: What can science reveal about our “character” — that core of good, or evil, that shapes our moral behavior? The answer, according to a new book, is that there may not be much of a core, after all. In “Out of Character,” scientists David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdelsolo argue that how we think about character — a conception that dates back to at least the ancient Greeks — is deeply flawed. Our moral behavior, to a surprising degree, is shaped by the context in which we find ourselves. Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook spoke recently with DeSteno about the book, and the broader implications of the new science. Read the whole story: Scientific American
