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Is Racism Just a Form of Stupidity?
The Huffington Post: I think that a lot of us are shying away from an obvious truth: that the kind of blatant racial prejudice we are witnessing in Ferguson, Missouri, has everything to do with stupidity. I'm talking about low intelligence, lack of mental ability, cognitive rigidity. Racists may be a lot of other things -- hateful, insecure -- but let's not sugar-coat what most fair-minded thinkers believe in their hearts: A person of intelligence cannot embrace such authoritarian and racist views. Intelligence is a scientific concept, something scientists can measure, and have for a long time.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Practice Does Not Make Perfect: No Causal Effect of Music Practice on Music Ability Miriam A. Mosing, Guy Madison, Nancy L. Pedersen, Ralf Kuja-Halkola, and Fredrik Ullén How essential is practice to achieving an expert level of performance? To answer this question, the authors asked monozygotic and dizygotic twins who play an instrument or sing how often they had practiced during four different age intervals (0-5 years, 6-11 years, 12-17 years, and 18 years till the time of measurement). The twins' music ability was assessed using a test of pitch, melody, and rhythm discrimination.
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The Power of Two: Why Sharing Is Better
My wife and I watch a lot of movies at home. It’s one of our favorite pastimes. I also watch a fair number of movies by myself, if my wife is out of town or busy with something else. Both of these activities are enjoyable, and I like the occasional solitude. But I enjoy the movies more when we watch them together, and I’ve often wondered why. It’s not that we talk during the movie, or communicate in any way really. We’re mostly silent, but we’re side-by-side, and that in itself seems to enhance the experience of watching a movie. Psychological scientists, it turns out, have noticed this phenomenon, too, and find it intriguing.
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When It Comes To Driving, Most People Think Their Skills are Above Average
If you ask someone to rate their driving skills on a one to 10 scale, there’s a good chance they’ll give themselves an above-average rating like a 7. Psychological scientists Michael M. Roy of Elizabethtown College and Michael J. Liersch of New York University found that although people may rate themselves as above average, they don’t think others would quite agree. Across four experiments, Roy and Liersch found that people often believed that others would rate them as a worse driver (about 10% worse) than they rated themselves. Because there is no standard definition for “good driving,” people tend to use their own unique, individual definitions.
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How racism shapes prison policy
The Boston Globe: WHY DOES AMERICA incarcerate so much of its population compared to other first-world countries? New research from psychologists at Stanford University suggests that some of our toughness on crime may be driven by racism. In one experiment, white voters in California were significantly less likely to sign a petition to weaken California’s three-strikes law after viewing a series of mug shots of which 45 percent were black men, compared to viewing a series of mug shots of which 25 percent were black men.
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Some Types of Fables May Be Better at Teaching Kids Not to Lie
Wired: To teach children not to lie, extolling the virtues of honesty may be more effective than focusing on the punishing consequences of deception. After listening to how a young George Washington admitted to chopping down a cherry tree—”I cannot tell a lie,” he famously said—children were significantly less likely to lie about their own dishonesty than if they heard “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” or “Pinocchio.” The difference? Unlike the fairy tales with their grisly punishments, George Washington is lauded for telling the truth.
