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The Decision-Making Puzzle
If you’ve ever played the classic puzzle-like computer game Tetris, you know that it starts out slowly. As the seven different pieces (called “zoids” by the initiated) descend from the top of the screen, a player has to shift the pieces horizontally and rotate them so that they fit into a gap in the stack of pieces at the bottom of the screen, or “well.” In early levels, the pieces might take 10-15 seconds to fall. The speed increases at each level. In world champion Tetris matches, players often start play at Level 18—in which pieces are on the screen for about a second.
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‘It’s About Human Nature’: What Science Tells Us About Being A Bandwagon Nats Fan
We’ve all done it. We’ve jumped on the bandwagon because something became popular. Many people in the region are now jumping on the Nationals’ bandwagon as they head to the World Series this week. ... Social psychologists such as American University professor Trina Ulrich describe the desire to join trends and popular celebrations as the Bandwagon Effect. “[It’s] essentially a psychological phenomenon that happens when people are doing something because others are doing it already,” Ulrich said. It has to do with a psychology term called dispositional hope. It’s the belief that you can achieve personal goals.
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Experienced Drivers Keep Their Eyes on the Road Differently
It can take years for motorists to fully develop the cognitive processes required to navigate safely, including learning to scan a wider swath of the road ahead.
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Robert Provine, scholar of laughter, yawns, and hiccups, dies at 76
Robert R. Provine, a neuroscientist who brought scientific rigor to the study of laughter, yawns, hiccups and other universal human behaviors that had previously gone largely unexplored, died Oct. 17 at a hospital in Baltimore. He was 76. The cause was complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, said his wife, Helen Weems. Dr. Provine had spent four decades as a psychology professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County before his retirement in 2013. He continued to teach at the university in recent years as a professor emeritus ...
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The Key To Raising Brilliant Kids? Play A Game
We all want to raise smart, successful kids, so it's tempting to play Mozart for our babies and run math drills for kindergartners. After all, we need to give them a head start while they're still little sponges, right? "It doesn't quite work that way," says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and co-author of Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children with Roberta Golinkoff. She's been studying childhood development for almost 40 years. So how does it work?
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Be Humble, and Proudly, Psychologists Say
Humility is a relative newcomer to social and personality psychology, at least as a trait or behavior to be studied on its own. It arrived as part of the effort, beginning in the 1990s, to build a “positive” psychology: a more complete understanding of sustaining qualities such as pride, forgiveness, grit and contentment. More recently, humility has found a foothold in the most widely used measure of personality traits, the five- factor questionnaire. The wallflower is attracting some attention, and so far appears to be absorbing it well. ... In their day jobs, research psychologists don’t typically need safety goggles, much less pith helmets or Indiana Jones bullwhips.
