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Rethinking the Rules for Police Interrogations
Undark: ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2006, a 16-year-old boy named Bobby Johnson confessed to murdering a retiree in New Haven, Connecticut. In his statement, Johnson said he borrowed a gun from his cousin. Then he and a younger friend robbed the old man and shot him through the window of an idling car. Johnson pleaded guilty at trial. He was sentenced to 38 years in prison. It was an open-and-shut case — or so it seemed. ... Johnson, for instance, had an IQ of 69, but there are few legal protections for people like him. Police cannot hurt or threaten suspects, but many psychological techniques — including lying about evidence — have been widely upheld as non-coercive.
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John Cacioppo: ‘Loneliness is like an iceberg – it goes deeper than we can see’
The Guardian: Professor John Cacioppo has been studying the effects and causes of loneliness for 21 years. He is the director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. His book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection examines the pathology and public health implications of the subject. You have been studying social connection and loneliness for more than two decades. How did you come to it as a subject? It was not biographical, I don’t think. Back in the early 90s I had outlined the new field called social neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms within a defined social species.
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Power Suits: How Dressing For Success At Work Can Pay Off
NPR: What does it mean to "dress for success"? Certainly not what it meant when a book by that name first came out in 1975. Now, what to wear to work is a murky area that includes a new clothing trend known as "athleisure" — workout wear that might also work for the office. ... Michael Kraus, a professor at the Yale School of Management, has studied the connection between clothing and financial advantage in negotiations. In a 2014 study, he paired men in suits against peers in sweatpants and flip-flops in a mock real-estate sale negotiation. The men in suits negotiated, on average, about 10 percent more profit than their casually dressed counterparts. Read the whole story: NPR
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Seeing Isn’t Required to Gesture Like a Native Speaker
People the world over gesture when they talk, and they tend to gesture in certain ways depending on the language they speak. Findings from a new study including blind and sighted participants suggest that these gestural variations do not emerge from watching other speakers make the gestures, but from learning the language itself. “Adult speakers who are blind from birth also gesture when they talk, and these gestures resemble the gestures of sighted adults speaking the same language.
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Why do police have such out-of-date psychological theories?
Aeon: What do police officers need to know to effectively do their jobs? They must ask the right questions to piece together the crimes that occurred, and make sure they don’t take advantage of the vulnerable or put innocent people in jail. But, do they actually know that they must know these things? When my colleague Chloe Chaplin and I pondered these points at work, in the department of law and social sciences at London South Bank University, we presumed that police officers would understand the things they needed to know to get the job done. Yet no one had ever put them to the test, and as two psychologists, we thought we would. Read the whole story: Aeon
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: To Live Among Like-Minded Others: Exploring the Links Between Person-City Personality Fit and Self-Esteem Wiebke Bleidorn, Felix Schönbrodt, Jochen E. Gebauer, Peter J. Rentfrow, Jeff Potter, and Samuel D. Gosling Does it matter if your personality meshes with the personality of the city in which you live? More than 500,000 participants from 860 cities across the United States were assessed for their Big Five personality traits, religiosity, and self-esteem. City-level personality was calculated from the personality scores for each trait within each city.
