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What Would You Pay for This Meal?
The New York Times: How often have you bought something you felt wasn’t worth the money? What if you could set the price? What factors would influence your number? For years, behavioral scientists have studied such questions. They often look at a model called P.W.Y.W. (Pay-what-you-want, that is.) The idea may seem like a consumer’s giddiest fantasy. But a real-life extreme version of the experiment unfolding at a restaurant in Montclair, N.J., is affirming the researchers’ predictions. It has been triggering a panoply of reactions — including anxiety, delight, incredulity, guilt and, yes, rampant opportunism. ...
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Can Faces Prime a Language? Evy Woumans, Clara D. Martin, Charlotte Vanden Bulcke, Eva Van Assche, Albert Costa, Robert J. Hartsuiker, and Wouter Duyck What cues initiate language selection in people who are bilingual? Spanish-Catalan bilinguals took part in simulated Skype conversations with interlocutors who spoke in either Spanish or Catalan.
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Why ‘Batman’ Met a Tragic Death on the Highway
Leonard B. Robinson, known as the "Route 29 Batman," was killed this week after his black “Batmobile” broke down on the highway. At the time of the accident, Robinson was dressed in the black Batman costume he often wore to cheer up sick children in the hospital. After his car experienced an engine problem, Robinson pulled over to the side of a dark highway where he got out of the car to check the engine in the dark. Robinson was killed when a passing car failed to spot him on the side of the road. Recent research has shown that pedestrians tend to underestimate how visible they are to drivers at night; likewise, motorists overestimate their own accuracy at spotting pedestrians in the dark.
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On Instagram, the Summer You’re Not Having
The New York Times: And how has your summer been so far? Have you been frolicking in the Hamptons with an Academy Award-winning actress? No? Then you have clearly not been having as good a time as Amy Schumer, who, as reported by Vanity Fair in an article titled “See Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Schumer Together on the Summer Vacation of Our Dreams,”documented on her Instagram account a trip she recently took with Ms. Lawrence, posting a blurry shot of herself and Ms. Lawrence on a Jet Ski. (There was also one of the two forming the top and bottom of a human pyramid on the deck of what appeared to be a rather sizable vessel.) ...
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Study finds parents can give their kids anxiety about math
TODAY: A new study in the journal Psychological Science by researchers at the University of Chicago finds that "when parents are more math anxious, their children learn significantly less math over the school year and have more math anxiety by the school year's end, but only if math-anxious parents report providing frequent help with math homework." The research, led by Erin A. Maloney, also finds that if a parent has anxiety about math, it might be best for him or her to steer clear of helping a child with math homework. Read the whole story: TODAY
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Daycare Doesn’t Lead to Aggressive Behavior in Toddlers
Working parents often worry about sending their toddlers to daycare. But the results of a new study that tracked almost 1,000 Norwegian children enrolled in daycare indicate that working parents can breathe a sigh of relief: The amount of time children spent in daycare had little impact on aggressive behavior. The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
