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Why Men Still Edge Out Women in Tech Jobs
The world’s top tech companies have realized that unconscious bias is bad for business. Elite companies like Facebook and Google are worried that subtle prejudices—for example, the implicit attitude that men are better than women at math and science—are leading hiring managers to unwittingly skip over the most competent, qualified candidates. "The tech industry overall has this belief that it's the most meritocratic industry of all and that bias and discrimination do not have a home here,” said Brian Welle, director of people analytics at Google, in USA Today.
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Clinical Psychological Science: Impaired Retrieval Inhibition of Threat Material in Generalized Anxiety Disorder Katharina Kircanski, Douglas C. Johnson, Maria Mateen, Robert A. Bjork, and Ian H. Gotlib People with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) often experience intrusive thoughts and have a bias for threat-related information. One reason proposed for this is that people with GAD may have impaired retrieval inhibition for threat material. Participants with and without GAD were assessed for anxiety and completed a retrieval-induced forgetting paradigm.
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Waking Up to Dangers of Drowsy Driving
We need to wake up to the fact that sleep is a vital component to safe driving, says psychological scientist Frank McKenna of the University of Reading. The link between sleep and driving safety is
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Groups of People Spot Lies More Often Than Individuals Do
Scientific American: A shifty gaze, fidgety stance or sweaty palms signal a liar in classic film noirs. In real life, however, it is surprisingly difficult to recognize when someone is telling a tall tale. Even among trained professionals, the lie-detection accuracy rate is only slightly better than pure chance. And courts tend to reject polygraph evidence because the tests lack standardized questions for determining falsehoods. For better odds, discussions of questionable claims appear to be the way to go. Psychologists at the University of Chicago have found that groups of people are consistently more reliable at rooting out fabrications than chance or individual judges.
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The ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ of stereotyping Asian American students
The Washington Post: “Ophelia” was never a very good student. The second generation Vietnamese American described herself as “not very intelligent,” someone who got straight Cs. She failed the exam to qualify for Advanced Placement classes at the end of Junior High. But for reasons beyond her understanding, she was placed on the AP track when she got to high school. There, surrounded by ambitious peers and high expectations, “something clicked,” she told researcher Jennifer Lee.
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Rethinking Work
The New York Times: HOW satisfied are we with our jobs? Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be. Why? One possibility is that it’s just human nature to dislike work. This was the view of Adam Smith, the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay.
