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Liberals Aren’t Like the Rest, or So They Think
Liberals tend to underestimate the amount of actual agreement among those who share their ideology, while conservatives tend to overestimate intra-group agreement, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. These findings may help to explain differences in how political groups and movements, like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, gain traction on the national stage: “The Tea Party movement developed a succinct set of goals in its incipient stages and effectively mobilized its members toward large-scale social change quite quickly,” says psychological scientist Chadly Stern of New York University.
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Teens Who Drink Alone More Likely To Develop Alcohol Problems as Young Adults
Most teenagers who drink alcohol do so with their friends in social settings, but a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh reveals that a significant number of adolescents consume alcohol while they are alone. The researchers found that, compared to their peers who drink only in social settings, teens who drink alone have more alcohol problems, are heavier drinkers, and are more likely to drink in response to negative emotions. Furthermore, solitary teenage drinkers are more likely to develop alcohol use disorders in early adulthood.
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Your Brain ‘Sees’ Things Even When You Don’t
The brain processes visual input to the level of understanding its meaning even if we never consciously perceive that input, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, led by Jay Sanguinetti of the University of Arizona, challenges currently accepted models about how the brain processes visual information. Sanguinetti, a doctoral candidate in the UA’s department of psychology in the College of Science, showed study participants a series of black silhouettes, some of which contained recognizable, real-world objects hidden in the white spaces on the outsides.
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Psychological Science Sets New Standards for Research Reporting
The leading journal in psychological science is introducing innovative new guidelines for authors, part of an effort to strengthen the reporting and analysis of findings in psychological research. The new author guidelines for the journal Psychological Science are among several related initiatives that researchers, led by the Association for Psychological Science, are undertaking to promote the replicability of scientific studies and the use of sound research practices across all areas of the field.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Shaping Attention With Reward: Effects of Reward on Space- and Object-Based Selection Sarah Shomstein and Jacoba Johnson The effect of rewards on conscious choice has been extensively researched, but the effect of reward on automatic processes is still not well understood. To investigate the effect of reward on automatic processes, the researchers investigated whether rewards would affect performance on a space- and object-based selective-attention task. The presence of a reward (money or points) altered participants' responses during the task.
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Living Through War Leads to In-Group Solidarity
War experiences have a long-term effect on human psychology, shifting people’s motivations toward greater equality for members of their own group, according to research forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. According to study co-author Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia, “these effects have the potential to explain both why conflict sometimes leads to cycles of war and sometimes stimulates nation-building in its wake.” “Our research shows that exposure to war affects human psychology in specific ways,” says psychological scientist and economist Michal Bauer of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.
