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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Brain's Tendency to Bind Audiovisual Signals Is Stable but Not General Brian Odegaard and Ladan Shams Studies have found that there is quite a bit of variability in the way people integrate information from different sensory modalities; however, little is known about the mechanism responsible for this between-person variability. Participants completed a temporal-numerosity judgment task in which they had to count the number of beeps and the number of flashes that were presented and a spatial localization task in which they had to localize auditory, visual, or audiovisual stimuli.
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Don’t Delay! Impatient People are Also the Worst Procrastinators
Across a series of experiments, impatient people were more likely to put things off – even when it meant a financial penalty.
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Can Israelis And Palestinians Change Their Minds?
NPR: What makes people change their minds? About the really hard stuff. Covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past three years, I've often wondered if people here ever do. This conflict is frequently described as "intractable," with neither side willing to give up their historical perspective or their entrenched positions to end it. And it does not take many interviews to hear repetitions of the same sweeping narrative repeated on each side. Palestinians from different places cite the same historical events to back their views. Israelis who have never met each other use similar turns of phrase.
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The Reason Our Minds Wander
The Atlantic: You probably aren’t living in the moment. Most people spend their leisure time in imaginary worlds—reading novels, watching television and movies, playing video games and so on. And when there isn’t a book or screen in front of us, our minds wander. This seems to be the brain’s natural state. Neuroscientists describe the brain regions involved in mind wandering as the “default network,” so-called because it’s usually humming along, shutting down only when something demands conscious attention. Read the whole story: The Atlantic
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Why We Think We’re Better Investors Than We Are
The New York Times: From their earliest days, the loosely confederated research efforts that came to be known as behavioral economics spawned a large quantity of studies centered on securities investment. This was not because the field’s pioneers were especially interested in stocks and bonds, nor was the early research commonly underwritten by financial services firms.
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The American Dream Is Alive and Well, Just Not So Much in America
TIME: Millions of immigrants have flocked to the United States in the hopes of making better lives for themselves. Nowadays, however, people hoping to achieve the iconic “American Dream” could be better off heading to Australia or Germany. That’s the central finding according to a recent study published in Psychological Science, which examined the influence of genetic factors on intelligence measures like aptitude and achievement, which are used to predict success at school and work. The researchers specifically wondered whether how these genetic influencers would differ between low and high levels of socioeconomic status, and whether the results would differ across countries.
