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Who’s Wealthy? Beyond Net Worth, Asset and Debt Levels Change Our Perceptions
Will borrowing money to buy a new car make you feel richer? It depends on your net worth, says a new study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. “People’s perceptions of wealth vary not only as a function of their net worth, but also of the amount of assets and debt they have,” says Princeton University psychology graduate student Abigail B. Sussman, who wrote the study with Princeton professor Eldar Shafir. In fact, increasing your assets by taking on debt affects perceived wealth in opposite ways for people who are in the red (their debt outweighs their assets), or in the black (their assets outweigh their debt).
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Meta-Analysis Helps Psychologists Build Knowledge
When scientists want to know the answer to a question that’s been studied a great deal, they conduct something called a meta-analysis, pooling data from multiple studies to arrive at one combined answer. Some people think this creates a chilling effect, shutting off further inquiry. But the authors of a new paper published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, write that meta-analysis actually helps scientific fields develop. There are many meta-analyses in psychology and medicine, areas where studies find often conflicting results.
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Why Are Older People Happier?
Older people tend to be happier. But why? Some psychologists believe that cognitive processes are responsible—in particular, focusing on and remembering positive events and leaving behind negative ones; those processes, they think, help older people regulate their emotions, letting them view life in a sunnier light. “There is a lot of good theory about this age difference in happiness,” says psychologist Derek M. Isaacowitz of Northeastern University, “but much of the research does not provide direct evidence” of the links between such phenomena and actual happiness.
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Majority Groups Support Assimilation—Except When They’re Not Majorities
We generally think that views about how to integrate a diverse society depend on people’s positions in that society—that is, whether they’re in the racial, religious, or cultural majority or a member of a minority. In the U.S., “people tend to believe that blacks prefer pluralism and whites prefer assimilation,” says University of Delaware psychologist Eric Hehman. Assimilation asks minorities—whether newly arrived or historically rooted—to drop their cultural identities and adopt the ways of the majority. Pluralism recognizes and even celebrates minority cultures, which live cooperatively within the majority culture.
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Exercise Is Good for Your Waistline – But It’s a Writing Exercise
Is losing weight as simple as doing a 15-minute writing exercise? In a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, women who wrote about their most important values, like close relationships, music, or religion, lost more weight over the next few months than women who did not have that experience. “We have this need to feel self-integrity,” says Christine Logel of Renison University College at the University of Waterloo, who cowrote the new study with Geoffrey L. Cohen of Stanford University.
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People Don’t Just Think with Their Guts; Logic Plays a Role Too
For decades, science has suggested that when people make decisions, they tend to ignore logic and go with the gut. But Wim De Neys, a psychological scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, has a new suggestion: Maybe thinking about logic is also intuitive. He writes about this idea in the January issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Psychologists have partly based their conclusions about reasoning and decision-making on questions like this one: “Bill is 34. He is intelligent, punctual but unimaginative and somewhat lifeless. In school, he was strong in mathematics but weak in social studies and humanities.
