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Memories of Unethical Actions Fade Faster
Research suggests that in order to hold their heads up high despite their bad behavior, individuals may strategically “forget” their own immoral deeds.
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Psychologists grow increasingly dependent on online research subjects
Science: In May, 23,000 people voluntarily took part in thousands of social science experiments without ever visiting a lab. All they did was log on to Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online crowdsourcing service run by the Seattle, Washington–based company better known for its massive internet-based retail business. Those research subjects completed 230,000 tasks on their computers in 3.3 million minutes—more than 6 years of effort in total. The prodigious output demonstrates the popularity of an online platform that scientists had only begun to exploit 5 years ago. In 2011, according to Google Scholar, just 61 studies using MTurk were published; last year the number topped 1200.
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The Surprising Link Between the Economy and Narcissism
The Wall Street Journal: Is there a link between narcissism and recessions? That’s the question raised by a recent paper published in the journal Psychological Science, which suggested that coming of age in a recession may lessen the chance of someone becoming a narcissist—that is, having a grandiose sense of self-worth, entitlement and superiority. The Wall Street Journal spoke to the paper’s author, Emily C. Bianchi, an assistant professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, about her work and its implications for millennials, CEO pay and people’s satisfaction with their work. Following are edited excerpts from the conversation. Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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The big problem with one of the most popular assumptions about the poor
The Washington Post: In the late 1960s, Walter Mischel, a researcher at Stanford University, invited several hundred children to participate in a game in which they were given a choice: They could eat one sweet right away, or wait and have two a little later. Initially, the goal was simple: to see how and why people (kids in this case) delayed gratification. But after the end of the experiment, Mischel began to check in with as many of the participants' families as he could, and over the following decade he learned that his little experiment probably had much larger implications than he had anticipated. ...
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Missing-Phoneme Effect in Aural Prose Comprehension Jean Saint-Aubin, Raymond M. Klein, Mireille Babineau, John Christie, and David W. Gow, Jr. Studies repeatedly show that when people read text for comprehension while searching for a target letter, they miss a great number of the target letters that appear in function words such as "the" and "of." In this study, one group of native French speakers read two texts for comprehension while searching for a target letter; another group listened to a narration of the same two texts while listening for the target letter's corresponding phoneme.
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Google Enlists Psychological Science to Fight Office Snack Attacks
The way to an employee’s heart might be through their stomach as much as their wallet. One recent survey of 1,000 people found that free food at work was associated with a 20% higher likelihood of feeling extremely or very happy with their jobs. Silicon Valley tech companies have become famous for their lavish, free employee snacking options. At Google’s main campus in Mountain View, employees have access to over 30 different cafés serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as a variety of snacks. Google’s Toronto campus even has a “baconators” club where trained chefs prepare custom flavored bacon (as an example, Thai lemongrass, basil, and chili was one past flavor).
