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Steven Pinker: ‘Evolution Has Saddled Our Species With Many Irrational And Destructive Psychological Traits’
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. Pinker has won numerous prizes for his research and he is one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” Rainer Zitelmann: In your opinion, why do most people underestimate positive developments and so dramatically overstate negative developments? Steven Pinker: One reason is an interaction between the nature of cognition and the nature of journalism.
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Three Counterintuitive Ways To Build A Better Team
Picture this: You've been tasked with assembling a team to tackle a large, important program. It's your first time as a program lead, and you want to set your team, and yourself, up for success. You know that diversity is important, and, naturally, you want to stack the team with top talent. You can't wait to jump in and start solving problems. But is this really the right approach? The experts say no. If you want a high-performing team that will get the type of results your boss will rave about, follow these three counterintuitive tips: ... Stacking the team with similar top talent could result in failure.
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Why Faces Don’t Always Tell the Truth About Feelings
Human faces pop up on a screen, hundreds of them, one after another. Some have their eyes stretched wide, others show lips clenched. Some have eyes squeezed shut, cheeks lifted and mouths agape. For each one, you must answer this simple question: is this the face of someone having an orgasm or experiencing sudden pain? ... “The assumption for a long time was that facial expressions were obligatory movements,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston who studies emotion. In other words, our faces are powerless to hide our emotions.
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The Influence You Have: Why We’re Blind To Our Power Over Others
Think about the last time you asked someone for something. Maybe you were nervous or worried about what the person would think of you. Chances are that you didn't stop to think about the pressure you exerted on that person. Psychologists say we are often consumed with our own perspective, and fail to see the signs that others are uncomfortable, anxious or afraid. Vanessa Bohns, a professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, says researchers refer to this phenomenon as an "egocentric bias." This bias may reveal itself when we put others on the spot, like when we ask a co-worker out on a date or solicit a stranger for money.
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New Research in Psychological Science
A sample of research on mind-set theory, desire to be moral, subjective well-being around the world and across life span, and gender-equality paradox in STEM, and a replication of social facilitation/inhibition effects with cockroaches.
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Detecting Fake News Takes Time
A few weeks ago, I took part in a free-wheeling annual gathering of social scientists from the academic and tech worlds. The psychologists and political scientists, data analysts and sociologists at Social Science Foo Camp, held in Menlo Park, Calif., were preoccupied with one problem in particular: With an election looming, what can we do about the spread of misinformation and fake news, especially on social media? Fact-checking all the billions of stories on social media is obviously impractical. It may not be effective either.
