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Rationalizing Madly on Valentine’s Day
The Wall Street Journal: Call it the Valentine’s Day bias—the belief that, whether you’re attached or single, your own status is a kind of universal ideal. The funny thing is that people often do this to cope with whatever dissatisfaction they may have with their own status—and the unlikelihood that their status will change. Those are the findings of a trio of social scientists in a paper, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, called “ ‘The Way I Am is the Way You Ought to Be’: Perceiving One’s Relational Status as Unchangeable Motivates Normative Idealization of That Status.” Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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Science Shows Dating Websites Aren’t Better At Finding You Love
TechCrunch: I was really hoping this article would have ended differently. But after spending countless hours scanning tiny pixelated squares of people who were supposed to represent my mathematically determined soul mate, I found that online dating websites are modern-day versions of snake oil. I ended up back at bachelorhood after a long and expensive trek through computer-aided love services; I decided to look for love on the Internet mainly to test the hypothesis behind a blistering 50-page critique of hyped up promise of dating websites.
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Study Shows Limits on Brain’s Ability to Perceive Multifeatured Objects
New research sheds light on how the brain encodes objects with multiple features, a fundamental task for the perceptual system. The study, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that we have limited ability to perceive mixed color-shape associations among objects that exist in several locations. Research suggests that neurons that encode a certain feature -- shape or color, for example -- fire in synchrony with neurons that encode other features of the same object.
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Is Religion Just an Assortment of Gut Feelings?
The Huffington Post: The vast majority of the planet's seven billion people ascribe to some kind of religious belief -- that is, a faith in things that cannot be proven. This makes no sense from a scientific and psychological point of view, because supernatural beliefs -- in contrast to our evolved thinking in general -- serve no apparent purpose. They don't help us comprehend and navigate the world. Why would the human mind create them, and allow them to persist? ... These are just a few examples of common religious beliefs and practices, drawn from an article to be published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. There are many more.
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Why Even Radiologists Can Miss A Gorilla Hiding In Plain Sight
NPR: This story begins with a group of people who are expert at looking: the professional searchers known as radiologists. "If you watch radiologists do what they do, [you're] absolutely convinced that they are like superhuman," says Trafton Drew, an attention researcher at Harvard Medical School. About three years ago, Drew started visiting the dark, cavelike "reading rooms" where radiologists do their work. For hours he would stand watching them, in awe that they could so easily see in the images before them things that to Drew were simply invisible. ...
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Feeling anxious? Think again.
Americans' number one fear is public speaking, hands down. Pollsters have reported time and again that the average person dreads speaking more than disease or even death. These polls merely confirm what our sweaty palms and elevated heart beat make undeniable: Standing up and addressing an audience brings out our worst misgivings about performance and failure and the judgment of others. We all experience some measure of social anxiety, but some people suffer much more than others, and not just with public speaking. Dates, job interviews, even idle cocktail chatter—any kind of social encounter can be a source of unbearable dread for people with a social anxiety disorder, or SAD.
