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Would You Let the Police Search Your Phone?
Law enforcement officers on the doorstep threatening to “come back with a warrant” is a cliché of police procedural dramas. Things are much less dramatic in real life: The officers ask if they can take a look around, and the civilians say yes without putting up a fight. A key question in so-called “consent-search” cases is why people so readily agree to allow intrusions into their privacy. The answer, as we argue in a forthcoming article in The Yale Law Journal, is that psychologically, it’s much harder to refuse consent than it seems. The degree of pressure needed to get people to comply is shockingly minimal — and our ability to recognize this fact is limited.
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50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the ‘moon hoax’
The moon is having a star turn. This summer will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, and the Trump administration has ordered NASA to put astronauts back on the moon by 2024. None of this, however, will probably change the minds of people who live in a parallel belief universe where NASA faked the Apollo moon landings. The moon hoax isaclassic conspiracy theory — elaborate, oddly durable, requiring the existence of malevolent actors with a secret agenda. The moon-fakers are allegedly so competent they can fool the whole world (but not so competent that they can actually put humans on the moon).
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Controlling Our Thoughts Is Harder Than It Seems
Research shows that even when we think we’ve successfully suppressed a thought, its traces may still linger outside conscious awareness.
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How The Brain Shapes Pain And Links Ouch With Emotion
When Sterling Witt was a teenager in Missouri, he was diagnosed with scoliosis. Before long, the curvature of his spine started causing chronic pain. It was "this low-grade kind of menacing pain that ran through my spine and mostly my lower back and my upper right shoulder blade and then even into my neck a little bit," Witt says. The pain was bad. But the feeling of helplessness it produced in him was even worse. "I felt like I was being attacked by this invisible enemy," Witt says. "It was nothing that I asked for, and I didn't even know how to battle it." So he channeled his frustration into music and art that depicted his pain. It was "a way I could express myself," he says.
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These Days, It’s Not About the Polar Bears
Climate science has struggled mightily with a messaging problem. The well-worn tactic of hitting people over the head with scary climate change facts has proved inadequate at changing behavior or policies in ways big enough to alter the course of global warming. --- Dr. Cook has designed a high school curriculum as well as a popular online course that presents students first with facts and then a myth about climate change; the students are then asked to resolve the conflict. In Europe, Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, codesigned an inoculation-based online game with doctoral researcher Jon Roozenbeek.
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Political Passion Inspires Trust—Even From Opponents
There's a lot of evidence suggesting that Americans trust each other less and less. But new research suggests an unorthodox solution to our political divide: firmly expressing our political opinions, even when they might prove unpopular. "Across five studies using a variety of contentious social issues, I found evidence that people trust others who demonstrate strong feelings about social issues, even when they disagree with or dislike them," reports Julian Zlatev of Harvard Business School.
