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A new religion has Americans looking to the stars
Belief in aliens is no longer fringe. Fifty-one percent of Americans think that unidentified flying objects are likely controlled by extraterrestrials — an increase of more than 20 percentage points since 1996. And one in three believe we’re likely to make formal contact with aliens in the next 50 years. But as someone who studies the psychology of religion, what’s most striking to me isn’t the widespread belief that aliens are out there — in the vastness of the universe, it’s unlikely that we’re alone — but rather the growing popularity of blending this belief with spirituality.
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Driving Simulation and AI Deepen Insights into Impulsivity
Lab experiments sometimes have participants engage in tasks that don’t capture the full range of behaviors people display in their day-to-day lives, but pairing realistic tasks with machine learning could help researchers more accurately assess individuals’ personality traits.
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Daniel Kahneman, Nobel-winning economist, dies at 90
Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist and best-selling author whose Nobel Prize-winning research upended economics — as well as fields ranging from sports to public health — by demonstrating the extent to which people abandon logic and leap to conclusions, died March 27. He was 90. His death was confirmed by his stepdaughter Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor for the New Yorker. She did not say where or how he died. Dr. Kahneman’s research was best known for debunking the notion of “homo economicus,” the “economic man” who since the epoch of Adam Smith was considered a rational being who acts out of self-interest. Instead, Dr.
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Science Breaks Through the Barricades to Mental Healthcare
Researchers and clinicians are attempting to break down the institutional and social factors that block marginalized populations from receiving mental health services.
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The Smartphone Kids Are Not All Right
I did not know this at the time, but apparently my children were part of a generation of guinea pigs. “It’s as though we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars when we gave them smartphones in the early 2010s in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,” Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. ... The picture, however, looks a lot less clear when you talk with an actual young person. In this episode, I spoke with my child Jacob, and we juxtapose theory with lived experience.
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Feeling Lonely Isn’t Just About Being Alone
The more time you spend alone, the more likely you are to be lonely, right? Seems obvious. But it isn’t always true, according to a new study. For instance, it found that although, in general, those who spend the most time alone are the loneliest, that isn’t the case for young people; their time alone has little impact on how lonely they feel. What’s more, people who spend the least time alone tend to be slightly lonelier than those between the extremes. ... But age made a significant difference. Study participants over the age of 40 generally were more likely to feel lonely when they spent more time alone.
