-
Genes and the American Dream
Scientific American: Nearly a century after James Truslow Adams coined the phrase, the “American dream” has become a staple of presidential campaign speeches. Kicking off her 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton told supporters that “we need to do a better job of getting our economy growing again and producing results and renewing the American dream.” ... A study just published in Psychological Science by psychologists Elliot Tucker-Drob and Timothy Bates reveals that this version of the American dream is in serious trouble.
-
New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Brain's Tendency to Bind Audiovisual Signals Is Stable but Not General Brian Odegaard and Ladan Shams Studies have found that there is quite a bit of variability in the way people integrate information from different sensory modalities; however, little is known about the mechanism responsible for this between-person variability. Participants completed a temporal-numerosity judgment task in which they had to count the number of beeps and the number of flashes that were presented and a spatial localization task in which they had to localize auditory, visual, or audiovisual stimuli.
-
Don’t Delay! Impatient People are Also the Worst Procrastinators
Across a series of experiments, impatient people were more likely to put things off – even when it meant a financial penalty.
-
Can Israelis And Palestinians Change Their Minds?
NPR: What makes people change their minds? About the really hard stuff. Covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past three years, I've often wondered if people here ever do. This conflict is frequently described as "intractable," with neither side willing to give up their historical perspective or their entrenched positions to end it. And it does not take many interviews to hear repetitions of the same sweeping narrative repeated on each side. Palestinians from different places cite the same historical events to back their views. Israelis who have never met each other use similar turns of phrase.
-
The Reason Our Minds Wander
The Atlantic: You probably aren’t living in the moment. Most people spend their leisure time in imaginary worlds—reading novels, watching television and movies, playing video games and so on. And when there isn’t a book or screen in front of us, our minds wander. This seems to be the brain’s natural state. Neuroscientists describe the brain regions involved in mind wandering as the “default network,” so-called because it’s usually humming along, shutting down only when something demands conscious attention. Read the whole story: The Atlantic
-
Why We Think We’re Better Investors Than We Are
The New York Times: From their earliest days, the loosely confederated research efforts that came to be known as behavioral economics spawned a large quantity of studies centered on securities investment. This was not because the field’s pioneers were especially interested in stocks and bonds, nor was the early research commonly underwritten by financial services firms.
