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Can Playing Together Help Us Live Together?
APS Member/Author: Elizabeth Levy Paluck The contact hypothesis in psychology predicts that prejudice can be reduced when rival groups come together under optimal circumstances of cooperation and equal status. To date, the weight of real-world evidence for this hypothesis comes from self-reported attitudes after self-initiated contact, not from preregistered randomized trials that take intergroup contact as seriously as one would take a potential vaccine for conflict (1, 2). Consequently, on page 866 of this issue, the results of Mousa's (3) new field experiment are breaking news.
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Why Do Travelers Still Fall for Drip Pricing?
Andrew Taylor keeps falling for drip pricing. He finds a low price on an airline ticket, car rental or hotel room — and then, once he starts the booking process, the cost rises until he reaches the final screen. But he buys anyway. “I think many of us know that the given price on an advertisement will never actually be the real price,” he says. “We’re just naturally drawn to a low price and work through the process to discover the real price.” Taylor should know better. He runs a Suffolk, England, legal services company that specializes in creating clearly worded “gotcha-free” contracts. But he says he doesn’t want to go through the trouble of finding a more honest price.
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Education Benefits the Brain Over a Lifetime
A new study confirms what your parents always told you: Getting an education opens the door to career opportunities and higher salaries. But it may also benefit your well-being in old age. "The total amount of formal education that people receive is related to their average levels of cognitive [mental] functioning throughout adulthood," said researcher Elliot Tucker-Drob, from the University of Texas, Austin. "However, it is not appreciably related to their rates of aging-related cognitive declines," he added in a news release from the Association for Psychological Science.
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Why Being Kind Helps You, Too—Especially Now
In January, Rachel Glyn’s husband of 36 years died of cancer. Two months later, the pandemic and lockdown hit. Alone in her Philadelphia apartment, Ms. Glyn spent her time worrying about the coronavirus, the financial markets and the civil unrest happening a few blocks away. Some days, she says, she wished she would die. “I’ll never have another day that doesn’t stink,” she told herself. Then one morning, Ms. Glyn, who is 66, heard about a local blood drive and thought, “My life isn’t a pathetic mess after all: I have the ability to give.” She walked to a nearby hospital and donated. Afterward, she was “exhilarated,” she says. “It felt wonderful to do something useful for someone,” Ms.
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Apparently There Are 4 Kinds of Introversion
It’s hard to believe now, but introversion was once a mostly misunderstood personality trait. Now, it’s the subject of countless books and articles and listicles (and, more recently, parodies of listicles). And as more regular, non-scientist types started to talk about introversion, psychologist Jonathan Cheek began to notice something: The way many introverts defined the trait was different from the way he and most of his academic colleagues did. “When you survey a person on the street, asking them to define introversion, what comes up as the prototypical characteristics … are things like thoughtful or introspective,” said Cheek, a psychology professor at Wellesley College.
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Quarantine Envy Got You Down? You’re Not Alone
When the coronavirus hit France, Leila Slimani, a popular French-Moroccan novelist, and her family left Paris for their country home. Once there, Ms. Slimani began writing a quarantine diary for the newspaper Le Monde. The response, especially from people in teeny Parisian apartments, was so scathing, she apparently abandoned the series. When the billionaire David Geffen posted photos of his mega-yacht on Instagram while he quarantined in the Grenadines, the backlash led him to turn his account private. Quarantine envy: If it’s not a widespread term yet, it should be. Envy, of course, is the joy-devouring emotion of craving what others have.
