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Detecting Fake News Takes Time
A few weeks ago, I took part in a free-wheeling annual gathering of social scientists from the academic and tech worlds. The psychologists and political scientists, data analysts and sociologists at Social Science Foo Camp, held in Menlo Park, Calif., were preoccupied with one problem in particular: With an election looming, what can we do about the spread of misinformation and fake news, especially on social media? Fact-checking all the billions of stories on social media is obviously impractical. It may not be effective either.
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U.Va. Researchers Find Texts Can Be Early Warning For Suicide Prevention
Researchers at the University of Virginia hope to use text messages to help clinicians detect an increased risk of suicide attempts in real-time. With software that gauges a person’s mood according to the frequency of positive or negative words sent in a text — like happy, joyful, hate or mad — lead author Jeff Glenn and others aim to use digital data to move suicide prevention beyond relying on patients to self-report suicidal thoughts that can sometimes be fleeting or concealed. “When the clinician is doing a risk assessment, we’re only getting a really narrow snapshot in time during that face-to-face encounter,” Glenn said in a news release Monday.
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Liar, Liar, Liar
When we think about dishonesty, we mostly think about the big stuff. We see big scandals, big lies, and we think to ourselves, I could never do that. We think we're fundamentally different from Bernie Madoff or Tiger Woods. But behind big lies are a series of small deceptions. Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, writes about this in his book The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. "One of the frightening conclusions we have is that what separates honest people from not-honest people is not necessarily character, it's opportunity," he said.
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New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on political attitudes, reliability of memory, and religious cognition.
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New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science
A sample of articles on virtues and their measurement, the morality of war, the importance of organizing psychological knowledge, and how to study everyday moral judgments.
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Eager For The Results of The Nevada Caucus? Psychology Urges Us to be Patient
The British politician John Major once said, “The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience.” And, with the Iowa caucuses still fresh in people’s minds, it might be a good time to remind ourselves of the many merits of patience. Here are five research-backed reasons why we should do our best to stay calm in the face of election uncertainty. ... Mischel and his team first experimented with the Marshmallow Test in the early 1970’s.
