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Will Sanders Supporters Come Around?
The New York Times: Looming over the Democratic National Convention this week was the threat of party division. Will the rift between Hillary Clinton’s supporters and Bernie Sanders’s supporters be mended? Or will there be a failure to reconcile, imperiling the effort to defeat Donald J. Trump in the presidential election? We are not political analysts. But as psychologists, we believe the science of intergroup dynamics offers Democrats reasons for optimism. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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The Lie That Many People Who Eat Meat Tell Themselves
New York Magazine: If you ask a meat eater, “Which meat is okay to eat, and why?” most people will at least attempt to form a coherent answer couched in moral language. They’ll attempt to defend their own decisions, in other words, on some rational basis. But as we know from piles and piles of research into moral psychology, people hold many moral beliefs not for rational, easy-to-explain reasons, but rather for gut-level, intuitive, hard-to-explain ones. When it comes to our morality, we are frequently post-facto rationalizers. ...
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Baby boomers are taking on ageism — and losing
The Washington Post: By and large, Dale Kleber had a pretty straightforward trip up the economic ladder. He went to law school and worked his way up to general counsel of a major food distributor in Chicago and then chief executive of a dairy trade organization. He is putting his third and fourth kids through private college. “Our generation was pretty spoiled,” says Kleber, 60. “We had it good. The economy was in a huge growth spurt. Some dips here and there, but nothing severe.” But a couple of years ago, Kleber hit a roadblock. He’d left the dairy group and started looking for another job; he and his wife didn’t have quite enough saved to retire comfortably.
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Cooperation, Fast and Slow
Working together isn’t always easy, especially when a stubborn supervisor or colleague is always putting their own self-interests ahead of what’s best for the group. When cooperation within an organization begins to crumble, productivity, morale, and profitability can all take a nosedive. Researchers have a long history of exploring what motivates people to cooperate – or not – and how to foster and encourage effective collaboration within and across groups. Psychological scientist David G. Rand (Yale University) recently took an in-depth look at some of the cognitive factors that influence our inclination to cooperate: intuition and deliberation.
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How your mind controls your blood sugar
Science: What if you could control your blood sugar levels with your mind? A new study suggests that you can—just not consciously, Ars Technica reports. Researchers instructed type 2 diabetics to play video games in a room for 90 minutes, along with a clock that ran faster, slower, or the same speed as actual time. Asked afterward, those in the room with the “slow” clock (which had a 45-minute delay) thought less time had passed—and their blood sugar dropped about half as quickly as those in the “fast” room (which had a clock that ran for 180 minutes), the researchers report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read the whole story: Science
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The Replication Game: How Well Do Psychology Studies Hold Up?
NPR's Science Friday: Replication is a cornerstone of scientific research, a way of checking to make sure a particular effect or result is real and not a statistical anomaly. But a lot of research can’t be replicated—a fact that recently hit home in the field of psychological science. Last year, for instance, researchers at the Center for Open Science found that they were unable to replicate findings in 61 out of 100 psychology papers selected, the most of any field they tested. But there’s another problem: Many journals shy away from accepting studies that revisit earlier, high-profile research that turns out to be irreproducible. Read the whole story: NPR's Science Friday
