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How Psychology Explains Partisanship
Why are Americans so politically polarized? For June’s Masthead book club, members chose a read that addresses the question from a psychological perspective: the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. (Haidt, by happy coincidence, is also a Masthead member.) He argues that political divides are abetted by the fundamentally intuitive, instead of rational, nature of our minds. Using the metaphor of a mind divided into an elephant and a rider, or its intuitive and conscious parts, he demonstrates how much the intuitive part controls our thinking.
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A Lost Secret: How To Get Kids To Pay Attention
Fifteen years ago, psychologists Barbara Rogoff and Maricela Correa-Chavez ran a simple experiment. They wanted to see how well kids pay attention — even if they don't have to. They would bring two kids, between the ages 5 to 11, into a room and have them sit at two tables. Then they had a research assistant teach one of the kids how to assemble a toy. The other kid was told to wait. Rogoff says they would tell the second child, "You can sit over here, and in a few minutes you'll have a turn to make this origami jumping mouse," — a different task altogether. Rogoff and Correa-Chavez wanted to see what the waiting child did. Would she pay attention to the research assistant.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring callous-unemotional traits and anxiety, mediators and mechanisms in psychotherapy research, executive function and depressive symptoms across development, and core deficits in borderline personality disorder.
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What is your earliest childhood memory – and did it really happen?
It is a much pondered and discussed subject: your earliest childhood memory. For some, it is their first bee sting or a formative interaction with a parent as a toddler. Others claim to be able to recall lying in a pram. But how sure are you that you have actually remembered this experience, rather than it being informed by photographs and family anecdotes? A new study published in the Psychological Science journal found that 40% of people believe they have a first memory dating back to the age of two or earlier, including having a nappy changed, being in a pushchair or even walking for the first time.
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Confronting Implicit Bias in the New York Police Department
An unarmed black man holding a cellphone, Stephon Clark, is fatally shot in his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento and residents ask whether the officers only saw race when pulling their triggers 20 times. Saheed Vassell, a mentally ill black man waving a pistol-shaped metal car part at pedestrians, is gunned down by police officers on a street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and the outrage focuses on whether deep-seated prejudices fueled the quick use of deadly force. Two black men are led in handcuffs from a Starbucks in Philadelphia and alarm bells go off: Had the officers unconsciously adopted the racial bias of the store employee who called the police?
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Parents who lack control at work may become more controlling at home
Working at an office job typically involves giving up some measure of control—whether it involves abiding by a dress code, tracking billable hours, or arriving at 9AM sharp. But research shows that workplaces that tilt too far into micromanaging territory wind up with unhappy, stressed-out, unmotivated, low-performing employees. And a recent article by Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Originals, argues denying employees autonomy also affects what kinds of parents they are at home.
