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What Makes a Person Trustworthy? Science May Provide Some Clues
Knowing who to trust is part and parcel of everyday life. Instinctively we may trust one person but not fully understand why. Researchers have puzzled over this question for decades, trying to piece together what makes a person trustworthy or not. “Trustworthiness is essentially being a prosocial person,” says Sebastian Siuda, a psychologist who researches the dynamics of trust. “If somebody opens up to you and makes [themselves] vulnerable to you, you don’t use that act for your own good, but you repay that vulnerability.” ...
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Loneliness Across the Globe: A Life-Span Approach
Podcast: Under the Cortex hosts Samia Akther Khan, King’s College London, whose research examines the feeling of loneliness across lifespan.
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The Science of Happiness Sounds Great. But Is the Research Solid?
In a new review in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers Elizabeth Dunn and Dunigan Folk found that many common strategies for increasing our happiness may not be supported by strong evidence. In fact, almost 95% of experiments on three common strategies—spending time in nature, exercise and engaging in mindfulness/meditation—did not hold up to even the most basic of current best practices for showing psychological effects. ...
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Silence Is a ‘Sound’ You Hear, Study Suggests
The hush at the end of the musical performance. The pause in a dramatic speech. The muted moment when you turn off the car. What is it that we hear when we hear nothing at all? Are we detecting silence? Or are we just hearing nothing and interpreting that absence as silence? The “Sound of Silence” is a philosophical question that made for one of Simon & Garfunkel’s most enduring songs, but it’s also a subject that can be tested by psychologists. In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers used a series of sonic illusions to show that people perceive silences much as they hear sounds.
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To Stay Sharp as You Age, Learn New Skills
In most adults, learning and thinking plateau and then begin to decline after age 30 or 40. People start to perform worse in tests of cognitive abilities such as processing speed, the rate at which someone does a mental task. The slide becomes steeper after 60 years of age. These changes are often ascribed to normal aging. But what if instead they represent something more like the “summer slide” that schoolchildren experience? Every year teachers and parents observe how summer vacations lead some children’s academic progress to backslide.
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Repeated Exposure to News Headlines Makes Behavior Seem Less Unethical
From frequent smartphone notifications to repetitious TV news programs, we often experience repeated exposure to various news headlines as we go about our daily lives. When the news provides stories of wrongdoing, that repeated exposure may influence our own sense of morality, making those narratives seem more true and less unethical.
