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Is the Justice System Overly Punitive?
Scientific American: Twenty years ago Rwanda was torn apart by violence. The Hutu majority slaughtered their Tutsi neighbors, killing approximately 70% of the Tutsi minority in the space of only four months. Once the killing finally stopped, a difficult question arose: how to right these monstrous wrongs without creating a cycle of revenge and retribution? Such a cycle would be the epitome of the ancient “eye for an eye” notion of justice, in which punishment is commensurate with the crime, an approach taken even today by most modern legal systems (including the United States). The aim is simple—when someone is wronged, the goal of punishment is to hurt the perpetrator.
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The ‘Bilingual Advantage’ May Not Actually Be a Thing
New York Magazine: It feels like at some point in the recent past, the notion that being bilingual offers certain cognitive advantages (above and beyond allowing one to communicate in two languages) went fully mainstream. It almost seems obvious now: Well, duh, obviously exposure to a whole other language is going to change your brain in beneficial ways, specifically when it comes to focus and switching between tasks. But not so fast: A new metastudy in Psychological Science suggests that there's some skewing going on when it comes to which sorts of studies on this subject are published — and, as a result, which ones trickle down to garner mainstream attention.
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Dumbing It Down in the Cockpit
Slate: Long gone are the leather jackets, goggles, and silk scarves flung over the shoulders of aviators who wrestled with flight controls, furiously scanned instruments, and navigated using paper charts. Airplanes have been largely flying themselves since the early 1980s. Today, with a few keystrokes, pilots program the details of a flight route into a computer that calculates, in seconds, the bearings, distances, altitudes, speeds, and fuel needed to get the airplane from city to city. Aircraft navigation? Yes, there is an app for that.
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Across America, whites are biased and they don’t even know it
The Washington Post: Most white Americans demonstrate bias against blacks, even if they're not aware of or able to control it. It's a surprisingly little-discussed factor in the anguishing debates over race and law enforcement that followed the shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers. Such implicit biases -- which, if they were to influence split-second law enforcement decisions, could have life or death consequences -- are measured by psychological tests, most prominently the computerized Implicit Association Test, which has been taken by over two million people online at the website Project Implicit. ...
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Replicability and Robustness of Genome-Wide-Association Studies for Behavioral Traits Cornelius A. Rietveld, Dalton Conley, Nicholas Eriksson, Tonu Esko, Sarah E. Medland, Anna A. E. Vinkhuyzen, Jian Yang, Jason D. Boardman, Christopher F. Chabris, Christopher T. Dawes, Benjamin W. Domingue, David A. Hinds, Magnus Johannesson, Amy K. Kiefer, David Laibson, Patrik K. E. Magnusson, Joanna L. Mountain, Sven Oskarsson, Olga Rostapshova, Alexander Teumer, Joyce Y. Tung, Peter M. Visscher, Daniel J. Benjamin, David Cesarini, Philipp D.
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Movies May Rev Up Teens’ Reckless Behavior Behind the Wheel
Research has long shown that children’s behavior can be influenced by what they see in movies, TV, and video games. In light of this, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) considers factors such as violence, sex, foul language, smoking, and drug use when assigning ratings for movies so that parents can make informed decisions about what their children watch. A newly published study provides evidence indicating another on-screen behavior that could be added to this list: reckless driving. The study shows that children exposed to reckless driving in movies may end up emulating that behavior once they’re old enough to borrow the keys.
