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Can You Be Friends With Your Coffee Maker?
The number of devices you can talk to is multiplying—first it was your phone, then your car, and now you can boss around your appliances. Children are likely to grow up thinking everything is sentient, or at least interactive: One app developer told The Washington Post that after interacting with Amazon’s Alexa, his toddler started talking to coasters. But even without chatty gadgets, research suggests that under certain circumstances, people anthropomorphize everyday products. Sometimes we see things as human because we’re lonely.
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The Circadian Clock in Your Nose
When people tell you, “wake up and smell the roses,” they might be giving you bad advice. Your sense of smell may fluctuate in sensitivity over the course of 24 hours, in tune with our circadian clocks, with your nose best able to do its job during the hours before you go to sleep, according to a study published last month. The work, reported in the journal Chemical Senses, is part of a larger push to explore whether adolescents’ senses of taste and smell influence obesity.
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How Much is Too Much Bragging on A Resume?
Assessments of 60 resumes submitted for actual jobs revealed a difference between self-promotion and ingratiation.
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There’s No Toilet Like Home
There’s a full-body sigh that happens when you cross the threshold of your home for the first time after a long trip. And I do mean full-body: No sooner have your limp arms discarded your luggage on the floor and your lungs filled themselves with that sweet familiar home air than your gut feels the sudden, emphatic need to poop. For me, it happens within minutes, if not seconds. And I’m not alone. “This is indeed a very familiar story,” says Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne and author of Psychology in the Bathroom. “Most people feel more comfortable going to the bathroom in familiar—and private—surroundings.”
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Have psychologists found a better way to persuade people to save the planet?
In the 1990s, psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, developed a scientific theory to account for all the prejudice and violence in the world. Social dominance theory, which attributes sexism and racism (among other isms) to the way humanity organises its social structures, can be used to explain everything from opposition to welfare policies to why we go to war. Put simply, the theory states that people with power will always seek more of the desirable things in life (as they see it) at the expense of their subordinates. Today, researchers are applying social dominance theory to try to understand an even broader scope of behaviours.
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From cop to top psychologist
At the age of 18, more than 30 years ago, he joined the police force, attending to numerous cases such as domestic abuse and fights between gangsters. Today, Professor David Chan rubs shoulders with very different sorts, and moves in circles that saw him become in August the first scientist to be made a fellow in all six international associations of psychology. While his early and current careers might appear worlds apart, the 52-year-old psychologist at the Singapore Management University (SMU) disagrees.
