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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Evaluative Advantage of Novel Alternatives: An Information-Sampling Account Gaël Le Mens, Yaakov Kareev, and Judith Avrahami People often rate new items more favorably than old items. Why might this be? Theories explaining this phenomenon have suggested that new items may serve a purpose or solve a problem old items could not, or that through imitation of others use of new items, new items come into favor. The authors suggest that adaptive sampling may also account for the favoritism shown to novel alternatives. Specifically, people seek out positive experiences and avoid past negative experiences.
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How Inequality Leads to Obesity
Pacific Standard: Everyone who has ever turned to their friends Ben and Jerry for solace following a break-up is aware that painful emotions often lead to overeating. Yet when discussing the obesity epidemic among low-income families, policymakers tend to focus on more tangible factors, such as the cost and availability of healthy food. Over the past few years, a number of researchers have begun pointing out this emotion blindness, suggesting the stress of poverty is an under appreciated underlying problem. Two new studies that confirm and refine this proposition have just been published.
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Research Explores Consequences Of Revealing Embarrassing Details
NPR: Confessing embarrassing information is often better than withholding it. Research finds that people distrust withholders of details more than they dislike revealers of unsavory information. ... VEDANTAM: Well, there's this new research that looks at how we answer embarrassing questions. Honestly, Leslie John, Kate Barasz and Michael Norton at the Harvard Business School suggest that many of us might be picking the wrong approach. So when we're asked to fill out employee surveys or dating profiles, we often choose not to answer embarrassing questions. But it turns out, we underestimate the effect this has on other people's opinions of us.
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Leading While Female: Prepare for Backlash
Women leaders who show dominance may face backlash — but data suggest that implicit forms of dominance, such as body language or facial expressions, may not harm women’s status.
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Study: Face, race bias turns toys into weapons
USA Today: A new study by University of Iowa researchers finds that people are more likely to misidentify a toy as a weapon after seeing a black face than a white face — even when the faces in question are those of young children. "The surprise for us was that the magnitude of the racial bias was just as large for young boys as it was men," said lead study author Andrew Todd, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at theUniversity of Iowa.
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Your reaction to this confusing headline reveals more about you than you know
The Washington Post: In the wake of San Francisco's devastating 1906 earthquake, as survivors sifted through rubble and fires raged, the city's men and women responded to the chaos in an unusual way: by getting married. The magnitude 7.9 quake demolished the city, killed 3,000 people, and left hundreds of thousands homeless. But in the 10 days after the disaster, marriages in San Francisco and Alameda County surged to four times the normal rate. The Oakland Tribune observed "young couples scrambling about among the ruins trying to find where marriage licenses were issued," and The Louisville Courier-Journal remarked that couples were being "earthquaked into marriage." ...
