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Why We Miss Objects That Are Right in Front of Us
Easy right? But do you see the other toothbrush in the image as well? Most people will quickly spot the toothbrush on the front of the counter, but take longer — or even fail to find — the much bigger one behind it. The oversight has to do with scale. People have a tendency to miss objects when their size is inconsistent with their surroundings, according to a recent study in Current Biology. This is just the latest in a robust body of research that reveals how expectations dramatically affect our ability to notice what’s around us. Though the image above was provided by the authors of the study to illuminate their point, the study was set up slightly differently.
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Why Introverts Shy Away From Leadership
Introverted people don’t expect to enjoy being in charge — but research suggests these predictions are often wrong.
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What every teacher should know about … memory
The Guardian: There is a wealth of psychology research that can help teachers to improve how they work with students – but academic studies of this kind aren’t always easy to access, or to translate into the realities of classroom practice. This series seeks to redress that, by taking a selection of studies and making sense of the important information for teachers. No one study or journal can provide a definitive answer, but they can help offer some guidance. Some of the studies I will choose in these articles are iconic, some quirky, some are large scale, and some have a small sample size. But all of them look to help answer the question: how can we help our students do better at school?
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Playing Up the Benefits of Play at Work
Popular notions of work may not allow for play, but research suggests it can benefit workers, teams, and organizations.
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How Norms Change
In November 18, 2016, ten days after Donald Trump won the Presidential election, graffiti appeared on a Brooklyn Heights playground named after Adam Yauch, a founding member of the Beastie Boys. Yauch, who died in 2012, was Jewish; a vandal had spray-painted two swastikas on the equipment and, beneath them, had written, “Go Trump.” The incident received national attention not just for its hateful nature but because it happened in a liberal enclave. To me, though, one of the most disturbing aspects wasn’t the swastikas themselves but the fact that they had been drawn incorrectly—one was backward and the other was misshapen.
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MILLENNIALS MAY NOT BE SUCH NARCISSISTS AFTER ALL
With each new generation, Americans are growing more narcissistic. That assertion, which has been backed up by research, has spread widely, presumably because it makes intuitive sense. It's easy to surmise that growing up in a world of selfies and social media would lead kids to worship their own reflections. However, this narrative has been challenged. And just-published research suggests it may be based on a misreading, or misinterpretation, of some widely cited data. ... "There may never have been an epidemic of narcissism," writes a team led by psychologists Eunike Wetzel of the University of Konstanz and Brent Roberts of the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign.
