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TikTok is Breeding a New Batch of Child Stars. Psychologists Say What Comes Next Won’t Be Pretty.
In 1968, Andy Warhol predicted that in the future, "everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes." He was right, and that was before TikTok, where all it takes to blow up is an iPhone and a pretty face. But Warhol couldn't have predicted that TikTok's algorithm would quickly sweep up a huge group of children, making them some of the most famous people in the world in the blink of an eye. The most-followed creator on TikTok, Charli D'Amelio, turned 16 on May 1. Loren Gray, whom D'Amelio recently overtook for the top spot on the short-form video platform, turned 18 in April.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on happiness and health, religious priming and risk taking, testosterone effects on decision-making, social mobility, the role of neighborhood characteristics on attention, and fighting COVID-19 misinformation.
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New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on close-relationships research, face processing, attentional control, cognitive-load theory, and open-source measures of cognitive ability.
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Stereotypes Harm Black Lives and Livelihoods, but Research Suggests Ways to Improve Things
The Black Lives Matter protests shaking the world have thankfully brought renewed attention not just to police brutality but to the broader role of racism in our society. Research suggests some roots of racism lie in the stereotypes we hold about different groups. And those stereotypes can affect everything from the way police diagnose danger to who gets interviewed for jobs to which students get attention from professors. Negative stereotypes harm Black Americans at every turn. To reduce their pernicious effects, it’s important to first understand how stereotypes work and just how pervasive they are.
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Why Facing Our Feelings is Essential for Tackling Our Climate Crisis
Thirty years ago, I sat in a darkened lecture hall listening to what was happening to our Earth because of the decisions people had made. Climate change, toxic contamination, species loss, forest fires, soil depletion: it was a litany of all the ways humans had gone very wrong. At least, that's how it felt to me, at age 19. Human behavior was directly influencing the globe's weather patterns. It was almost unthinkable. Apparently, it was so unthinkable for those around me -- that people were literally not thinking about it. ... We are seeing huge numbers of people starting to bravely name their feelings, openly: I am scared. I feel overwhelmed. I feel powerlessness. I feel angry.
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Does a Pie Chart Change Who You Are?
23andMe’s senior director of research, Joanna Mountain, says she’s long wondered how recreational DNA testing affects our thinking about genetic differences. This is more than a mere academic concern. More than than 30 million people have spit into vials or swabbed their cheeks in an ongoing search for family, history, and identity that has transformed America into a nation of seekers in recent years, and 23andMe’s database contains about a third of them. We test to find genetic relatives and to get those little ethnicity pie charts that promise to tell us how Irish, Korean, or Nigerian we are.
