-
How Liars Create the Illusion of Truth
BBC: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”, is a law of propaganda often attributed to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Among psychologists something like this known as the "illusion of truth" effect. Here's how a typical experiment on the effect works: participants rate how true trivia items are, things like "A prune is a dried plum". Sometimes these items are true (like that one), but sometimes participants see a parallel version which isn't true (something like "A date is a dried plum"). ... Recently, a team led by Lisa Fazio of Vanderbilt University set out to test how the illusion of truth effect interacts with our prior knowledge. Would it affect our existing knowledge?
-
Nudges That Help Struggling Students Succeed
The New York Times: When I was in high school, I earned A’s in all my math classes — until I took calculus. In algebra and geometry, I could coast on memorizing formulas, but now I had to think for myself. It was disastrous, culminating in my getting a charity “C,” and I barely passed my college calculus class. The reason, I was convinced, was that I didn’t have a math mind. I have avoided the subject ever since. It turns out that I got it wrong. While it’s unlikely that I could have become a math whiz, it wasn’t my aptitude for math that was an impediment; it was my belief that I had the impediment to begin with. Read the whole story: The New York Times
-
Here’s why the election has everybody stressing out
Philly Voice: Depending on your political bent, Donald Trump is either a tell-it-like-it-is political savior or hate-spewing threat to American democracy. Likewise, Hillary Clinton is either the most qualified presidential candidate in recent memory or a deceitful political scion ducking criminal charges. There seems to be no middle ground in the presidential election. And it's stressing people out. ... Frank Farley, a former APA president and professor of educational psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, was not surprised by the percentage of Americans stressed by the election.
-
How Cracking the Right Joke Benefits Salary Negotiations
Making a joke about an implausibly high salary at the beginning of a negotiation actually led to higher average salary offers.
-
Anxious about the election? Here’s some perspective.
The Washington Post: It’s hard to recall another time as uncertain as this. Americans are worried that they are vulnerable to terrorist attacks , that they won’t have enough money to retire or pay medical bills , that jobs are becoming less secure and that the next generation will be worse off financially than their parents . And they are downright frightened by the election. About the only thing partisans agree on is that a victory for the other side would be a catastrophe. There has been talk of insurrection, national collapse, even nuclear war.
-
The Problems with Poor Ballot Design
Scientific American: Tensions are mounting as we hurtle towards Election Day this Tuesday, yet with all the focus on who’s voting and where, most of us have put little thought into another essential part of the election process: the voting ballot itself. There are significant issues with the mechanics of voting, including the design of ballots and instructions for using them. Philip Kortum is a psychology professor at Rice University who studies how people interact with voting systems in real-world settings.
