-
False Confessions May Lead to More Errors in Evidence, a Study Shows
A man with a low IQ confesses to a gruesome crime. Confession in hand, the police send his blood to a lab to confirm that his blood type matches the semen found at the scene. It does not. The forensic examiner testifies later that one blood type can change to another with disintegration. This is untrue. The newspaper reports the story, including the time the man says the murder took place. Two witnesses tell the police they saw the woman alive after that. The police send them home, saying they “must have seen a ghost.” After 16 years in prison, the falsely convicted man is exonerated by DNA evidence. How could this happen?
-
The Psychology of Health Screening
Imagine it’s time for your annual physical. You visit your family doctor, and along with all the usual probes and tests and queries, your doctor tells you about a disease you’ve never heard of before. Called thioamine acetlyase, or TAA, deficiency, it affects the body’s normal ability to process nutrients, and can lead to severe medical complications—exhaustion, physical deterioration, even early death. Although studies indicate that one in five adults suffers from TAA deficiency, most are unaware that they even have the disease. But there is a test that screens for TAA deficiency, your physician tells you.
-
Solved: How Optical Illusion Turns Circles Into Hexagons
LiveScience: When you stare at a colorful image and then turn to look at a neutral background, a "ghost image" appears in contrasting colors. Now, new research finds that a similar illusion occurs with shapes, turning circles into hexagons and vice versa. Though similar, the two visual phenomena have different causes. While the color optical illusion, occurs because of tired-out light-sensing cells in the eye, the shape afterimage illusion arises from the visual parts of the brain, said study researcher Hiroyuki Ito, of Kyushu University in Japan. Read the full story: LiveScience
-
The Science of Success
The Atlantic: In 2004, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, a professor of child and family studies at Leiden University, started carrying a video camera into homes of families whose 1-to-3-year-olds indulged heavily in the oppositional, aggressive, uncooperative, and aggravating behavior that psychologists call “externalizing”: whining, screaming, whacking, throwing tantrums and objects, and willfully refusing reasonable requests. Staple behaviors in toddlers, perhaps. But research has shown that toddlers with especially high rates of these behaviors are likely to become stressed, confused children who fail academically and socially in school, and become antisocial and unusually aggressive adults.
-
Daniel Kahneman: ‘We’re beautiful devices’
The Guardian: The Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman lives in an airy penthouse on the 14th floor of an apartment block in downtown Manhattan, not far from the Eighth Street subway station. But never mind that for a moment. Instead, without thinking too hard about it, try answering the following question: roughly what percentage of the member states of the United Nations are in Africa? (I'll wait.) The correct figure isn't what's important here.
-
Better Scientific Research
The New York Times: “Fraud Case Seen as a Red Flag for Psychology Research” (news article, Nov. 3) discussed my concerns about current scientific practices within the context of a critique of psychology. I believe that the practice of publishing only a portion of collected data can enable scientists to present a biased perspective, even inadvertently (as I discuss in a recent Nature commentary). However, neither such biases nor the entirely different case of outright fraud are unique to psychology. Both are problems faced across disciplines. Indeed, psychology should be applauded for detailing how current scientific practices can lead to erroneous conclusions.
