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Could It Be? Researchers Find A Hiring Bias That Favors Women
NPR: Think, for just a moment, about the last job you applied for. If you didn't get the job (apologies), did you get an interview? If not, did you feel some hidden forces, beyond your control, working against you? Perceived hiring biases against women working in science, technology, engineering and math have been around as long as women have been graduating from STEM programs. From 2008 to 2010, women received the majority of doctorate degrees in life and social sciences but only 32 percent of the open assistant professorships. Now comes a study that offers something of a counter-narrative — that, given the chance, universities would rather hire women for STEM tenure-track positions.
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Look who’s swiping now: 6-month-old babies are using smartphones, study says
The Washington Post: Smart phone. Dumb idea. More and more Americans are handing their smartphones to their kids, some as young as 6 months old, according to a new study. Experts warn, however, that the habit could be harmful for a child’s development, despite the promises of cellphone “learning apps.” More than a third of kids under 1 year old are already swiping away on cellphones and tablets, according to a survey by pediatric researchers at the Einstein Healthcare Network. ...
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How to Combat Distrust of Science
Scientific American: Acceptance of science has become increasingly polarized in the United States. Indeed, a recent Pew poll shows that there is a substantial and growing amount of public disagreement about basic scientific facts, including human evolution, the safety of vaccines and whether or not human-caused climate change is real and happening. What is causing this, you might ask? People often interpret the same information very differently. As psychologists, we are more than familiar with the finding that our brains selectively attend to, process and recall information.
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When a Gun Is Not a Gun
The New York Times: THE Justice Department recently analyzed eight years of shootings by Philadelphia police officers. Its report contained two sobering statistics: Fifteen percent of those shot were unarmed; and in half of these cases, an officer reportedly misidentified a “nonthreatening object (e.g., a cellphone) or movement (e.g., tugging at the waistband)” as a weapon. Many factors presumably contribute to such shootings, ranging from carelessness to unconscious bias to explicit racism, all of which have received considerable attention of late, and deservedly so. But there is a lesser-known psychological phenomenon that might also explain some of these shootings.
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The Joy of Scents
Slate: Being able to transmit positive emotions may also have a profound social impact, says Gün Semin, a psychologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and lead researcher on the study. After all, “the pursuit of happiness is not an individual enterprise,” as he and his fellow researchers write rather eloquently in the new study. So Semin’s team decided to test whether people could communicate happiness via sweat. Read the whole story: Slate
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Think of the Future in Days, Not Years, to Meet Your Goals
Big Think: When given the choice, we often choose our present needs over the needs of our future selves. In fact, a recent study indicates that we see our future selves as a stranger — we don't care what happens to them down the line. Even though we probably should. Lead researcher Daphna Oyserman of the University of Southern California thinks there's a solution — a way to hack our brains to create a connection to the future and push our present selves to action. All you have to do is frame time in days instead of years. Read the whole story: Big Think
