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Meet The 2014 Winners Of The MacArthur ‘Genius Grants’
NPR: "Using statistical analysis to analyze how a defendant's skin color and hair texture relate to the sentencing decisions of jurors, Eberhardt has shown that black defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty if their facial characteristics are stereotypically black and their victims are white," the MacArthur Foundation writes. "Extending this research to the criminal sentencing of juveniles, she found that simply bringing to mind a black juvenile offender led people to perceive juveniles in general as more similar to adults and therefore more worthy of severe punishment, highlighting the fragility of protection for young defendants when race is a factor.
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To See Who Holds The Power In Your Relationships, Check Your Old Emails
io9: Power dynamics are everywhere, from our personal relationships to our professional ones. Do you know where do you stand in yours? Here's a little psychology experiment you can run at home. Finding out could be as simple as reading through your old e-mails. ... I'm going to spend the next few paragraphs introducing this subject, partly to contextualize what it is we're talking about, but also because it's just a fascinating subject. What we're dealing with here is language, specifically those parts of language that we often overlook, and how we use it.
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How Grocery Stores, Restaurants, Your Office And Even Your Kitchen Trick You Into Eating More
The Huffington Post: Chew on this: When it comes to eating healthfully, our environments may be working against us. Not always on purpose. But simple elements -- from the color paint in our kitchens to the size of the plates we use to whether we eat lunch at our desks or in the office break room -- all seem to influence the way we eat. Fortunately, food psychologist and behavioral economist Brian Wansink, Ph.D., director of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, has some actionable tips fornot getting duped by our environments. Wansink literally wrote the book on mindless eating, and now his new book -- titled Slim By Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life, out Sept.
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La douleur renforce la cohésion dans le groupe
Slate France: Partager une expérience douloureuse peut créer un sentiment de solidarité au sein d'un groupe, rapporte une étude publiée dans Psychological Science. En effet, la douleur pourrait avoir des conséquences sociales positives car elle agit «comme une sorte de "ciment social" qui favorise la cohésion et la solidarité au sein d'un groupe», rapporte l'article. «Les résultats mettent en lumière les raisons pour lesquelles les camaraderies peuvent se développer entre les soldats ou les autres personnes qui partagent des expériences difficiles et douloureuses», explique Brock Bastian, chercheur en psychologie à l'université de Queensland en Australie.
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Loneliness narrows the uncanny valley
CNET: Talking to inanimate objects when you're feeling lonely may not be so strange after all. According to new research conducted by a team at Darmouth College in the UK and Harvard University in the US, we're more likely to perceive life in inanimate faces when we're feeling socially disconnected. In short, if you're low on human contact, you might start feeling a little less creeped out by the uncanny valley -- because those faces look more alive to you. This is because, when people are starved of social contact, they start attributing human characteristics to objects: a face on a volleyball, for instance. Or a doll. Or... a robot.
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Why Hands-Free Phones Are A Driving Danger
By now, we should all know that talking on a cell phone while driving is a bad idea. So far, 14 states have banned driving with a handheld phone, but researchers caution that hands-free phones may be just as dangerous and distracting. In 2011 the National Transportation Safety Board called for an end to all cellphone use in the car saying, "there is no difference between hand-helds and hands-free." New research from a team of psychological scientists from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada further confirms that even hands-free phone conversations can have a negative impact on driver performance.
