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Robert Rosenthal, Who Linked Subtle Cues to Behavior, Dies at 90
Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist renowned as an expert in nonverbal communication, and in particular what he called the “self-fulfilling prophecies” in which subtle, often unconscious, gestures can influence behavior, died on Jan. 5 in Riverside, Calif. He was 90. His daughter Ginny Rosenthal Mahasin said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was an aneurysm. Widely considered one of the leading social psychologists of the 20th century, Dr. Rosenthal, who spent much of his career at Harvard, was best known for his work in the 1960s on what he called the Pygmalion effect — or, more technically, “interpersonal expectancy.” ...
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Interplay Between Humans and Algorithms the Focus of Journal Special Collection
A special collection of articles in Perspectives on Psychological Science provides insights from leading researchers on the interplay between humans and algorithms.
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PSPI Live: Developmental Science Research Informs Juvenile Justice Reform
In a January PSPI Live webinar, authors of a forthcoming article came together to discuss juvenile justice reform.
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‘Gender Inequities Are Important’: Why Couples Fall out of Love
The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women,” observed the late, great Nora Ephron. “It’s followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.” Relationship wisdom is full of such emphatic generalisations but, according to that eternally reliable media source “a recent study”, women do appear to fall in and out of love more extremely than men. A behavioural economist, Saurabh Bhargava of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has published a new study in Psychological Science, the leading journal in the field, which has a number of striking findings. The first is that women reported having feelings of love almost twice as frequently as men.
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The ‘Love Languages’ Are Popular. Are They Real?
If you’ve ever tried to improve communication in a relationship, you may have come across the concept of the five “love languages” — different ways of showing and receiving affection that have helped couples understand each other for decades. The theory comes from a Baptist pastor turned relationship counselor named Gary Chapman, whose 1992 book “The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts” has been on and off the bestseller list for years. Now, a group of researchers at the University of Toronto and York University have set out to investigate the scientific underpinnings of the love languages — or lack thereof.
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Disinformation Is the Real Threat to Democracy and Public Health
Disinformation is the coin of the modern realm. Vaccine denial, climate denial, election denial and war-crime denial have joined the grotesque denial of the Holocaust in the ranks of dishonesties now regularly foisted on the public. We can, however, do something about this crisis of the information age. In January the World Economic Forum (WEF) ranked the spread of misinformation among the greatest threats to humanity in its Global Risks Report. With more than four billion people voting in the upcoming 2024 elections (roughly half the world’s population), the report makes clear that now is the time to prepare the world against disinformation and those who peddle it. ...
