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Study Supports Suspicion That Police Are More Likely to Use Force on Blacks
The New York Times: The vast majority of interactions between police officers and civilians end routinely, with no one injured, no one aggrieved and no one making the headlines. But when force is used, a new study has found, the race of the person being stopped by officers is significant. The study of thousands of use-of-force episodes from police departments across the nation has concluded what many people have long thought, but which could not be proved because of a lack of data: African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.
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Playing Action Video Games Boosts Visual Motor Skill Underlying Driving
Playing action-based video games may boost players’ ability to coordinate incoming visual information with their motor control, a skill critical to many real-world behaviors including driving, new research shows. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. “Our research shows that playing easily accessible action video games for as little as 5 hours can be a cost-effective tool to help people improve essential visuomotor-control skills used for driving,” says researcher Li Li of New York University Shanghai, lead author on the study.
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Daredevil-like ability allows us to size up rooms—even when we can’t see them
Science: The blind comic book star Daredevil has a highly developed sense of hearing that allows him to “see” his environment with his ears. But you don’t need to be a superhero to pull a similar stunt, according to a new study. Researchers have identified the neural architecture used by the brain to turn subtle sounds into a mind’s-eye map of your surroundings. The study appears to be “very solid work,” says Lore Thaler, a psychologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom who studies echolocation, the ability of bats and other animals to use sound to locate objects. ...
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The Perilous Task of Forecasting
The Wall Street Journal: To get business right, finance chiefs need to be good forecasters. Yet research has shown that amateurs can actually be better than experts at predicting the future. Jason Zweig, The Wall Street Journal’s investing columnist, sat down with Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the co-author of “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction,” to explore why that is and what companies can learn from it. ... MR. TETLOCK: One reason is that experts sometimes know too much.
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The Eureka Factor
The Saturday Evening Post: This is how one of the pioneers in understanding the “aha! phenomenon” — those flashes of insight about a problem — carves out a creative, idea-inducing space for himself. On his 45-minute commute to and from his college office in Philadelphia, John Kounios picks the quiet car on the regional rail. No ringing cellphones. No chattering passengers. To further isolate himself, the affable professor of psychology at Drexel University puts on his noise-canceling Bose headphones, slaps on his sunglasses, and closes his eyes. No distractions, not even the rumble of the train nor the scenery streaking past the window. Read the whole story: The Saturday Evening Post
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There’s a Better Way to Manage Time Management
For many people, it feels as if we have more to do and less time to do it in than ever before: children need to be fed, bosses need you to stay late, and someone needs to get the car to the mechanic. Juggling all of our responsibilities can make it feel as though there just isn’t enough time in the day to accomplish everything. To wrangle our crunched calendars, we turn to “productivity hacks” and the newest time-saving apps, but new research suggests that maybe we would be better off spending some time managing our time management.
