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Dozens of Labs Respond to Call to Bolster Reliability of Psychology Research
Scientific American: A large international group set up to test the reliability of psychology experiments has successfully reproduced the results of 10 out of 13 past experiments. The consortium also found that two effects could not be reproduced. Psychology has been buffeted in recent years by mounting concern over the reliability of its results, after repeated failures to replicate classic studies. A failure to replicate could mean that the original study was flawed, the new experiment was poorly done or the effect under scrutiny varies between settings or groups of people. ... Ten of the effects were consistently replicated across different samples.
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Women Find Sexually Explicit Ads Unappealing — Unless the Price Is Right
Sexual imagery is often used in magazine and TV ads, presumably to help entice buyers to purchase a new product. But new research suggests that women tend to find ads with sexual imagery off-putting, unless the advertised item is priced high enough. The findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reveal that women’s otherwise negative attitudes about sexual imagery can be softened when the images are paired with a product that connotes high worth.
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Q&A: Christopher Chabris, psychology professor, on everyday illusions
SmartPlanet: When a politician tells a personal story that turns out to be false, does that make him a liar? When an employee exudes confidence, does that make her the smartest person in the room? Depite our intuition about the way our minds work, the answers might turn out to be no, according to Christopher Chabris, a psychology professor at Union College.
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Is Your Teen a Night Owl? That Could Explain His Poor Grades
TIME: Staying up late is almost a rite of passage for teens, but night owl students could be paying the price with lower grades years after high school. There’s plenty of research showing that the sleep-wake cycle of adolescents is about two hours behind that of pre-pubescent children, which means they are more likely to wake up later in the morning and go to bed later at night. And that also means they’re not well-timed with the school clock, either. But newly published research reveals that this mismatch may have lasting implications that dog high schoolers into their college years.
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Our Pupils Adjust as We Imagine Bright and Dark Scenes
Conjuring up a visual image in the mind -- like a sunny day or a night sky -- has a corresponding effect on the size of our pupils, as if we were actually seeing the image, according to new research. These findings, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that the size of our pupils is not simply a mechanistic response, but one that also adjusts to a subjective sense of brightness. “Visual imagery is a private and subjective experience which is not accompanied by strongly felt or visible physiological changes,” explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Bruno Laeng of the University of Oslo.
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Why Countries Invest Differently In Environmental Issues
NPR: Across the world, countries make very different investments in the environment. We're not just talking about measures to combat global climate change. We're talking about investments in clean water, forests, biodiversity. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam joins us regularly to share interesting new research, and he's here to tell us about an unexpected factor that seems to influence environmental stewardships. Shankar, welcome back. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Hi, David. GREENE: So, what's the unexpected factor that surprises you, here? VEDANTAM: Well, the X factor appears to be the age of the country, David.
