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Our Brains Say That Corporations Are People, Too
The Wall Street Journal: I remember the day I decided that I liked Pepsi. I don’t mean “like” concerning its taste—I can’t really distinguish between Pepsi and Coke. And I don’t mean the adolescent “like” as in, “Do you like her, or do you like-like her?” I mean “like” in that I wanted to give Pepsi a warm, appreciative handshake. I was in grad school in New York and had spent an afternoon at a great sculpture garden, open to the public, on the grounds of Pepsi’s corporate headquarters just outside the city. Afterward, I realized that I liked Pepsi, the corporation.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Conceptual Conditioning: Mechanisms Mediating Conditioning Effects on Pain Marieke Jepma and Tor D. Wager Although researchers know that classical conditioning can modify pain responses, the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Participants were conditioned to pair specific shapes with symbolic indicators of a high or low temperature. Participants' skin conductance responses were then measured as they completed a test phase in which the shapes preceded contact heat treatments.
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In The Classroom, Common Ground Can Transform GPAs
NPR: Many people have experienced the magic of a wonderful teacher, and we all know anecdotally that these instructors can change our lives. But what if a teacher and a student don't connect? How does that affect the education that child receives? Is there a way to create a connection where there isn't one? And how might that change things, for teachers and students alike? These are the sorts of questions that fascinated Hunter Gehlbach* and his colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Read the whole story: NPR
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Here’s Why Some People Are More Religious Than Others
TIME: When it comes to predicting the kind of people most likely to be religious, brainiac scientists used to be everyone’s last guess. The more educated a person was, the thinking went, the more likely they were to question the supernatural. But the supposed divide between science and religion—in which religion was seen as the less-educated person’s “science” of choice—has ironically been subject to little scientific debate, until recently. ... David Rand, who leads Yale University’s Human Cooperation Laboratory and studies decision-making, was one of the first to suggest that intuition and deliberation were key to a person’s religiosity in a paper he co-wrote in 2011.
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The winning Cubs and the psychology of ‘we’
Chicago Tribune: I was leaving the Tribune Tower on Tuesday afternoon as the Cubs were playing and heard a collective cheer from a nearby restaurant. I jumped in a taxi and the driver had the game blaring on the radio. And when I entered the building where I was going, security guards and others were huddled over their smartphones getting updates. By the time I left, the Cubs had won the National League Division Series 3-1, beating the St. Louis Cardinals. Jubilant strangers were high-fiving one another and spreading the news: "We won! We won!" ... I talked to Susan Krauss Whitbourne, a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a blogger for Psychology Today.
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A Short History of Empathy
The Atlantic: In a column for The New York Times this past January, Nicholas Kristof lamented what he called the country’s “empathy gap,” imploring his readers to grasp the complex circumstances that could plunge someone into poverty. Meanwhile, the psychologist Paul Bloom has argued that a sense of empathy can actually be “parochial [and] bigoted,” making it so “the whole world cares more about a little girl stuck in a well than they do about the possible deaths of millions and millions due to climate change.” ... By mid-century, empathy’s definition began to shift as some psychologists turned their attention to the science of social relations.
