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Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation
The spread of online misinformation poses serious challenges to societies worldwide. In a novel attempt to address this issue, we designed a psychological intervention in the form of an online browser game. In the game, players take on the role of a fake news producer and learn to master six documented techniques commonly used in the production of misinformation: polarisation, invoking emotions, spreading conspiracy theories, trolling people online, deflecting blame, and impersonating fake accounts.
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Want to Be Less Racist? Move to Hawaii
Kristin Pauker still remembers her uncle’s warning about Dartmouth. “It’s a white institution,” he said. “You’re going to feel out of place.” Dr. Pauker, who is now a psychology professor, is of mixed ancestry, her mother of Japanese descent and her father white from an Italian-Irish background. Applying to colleges, she was keen to leave Hawaii for the East Coast, eager to see something new and different. But almost immediately after she arrived on campus in 1998, she understood what her uncle had meant. She encountered a barrage of questions from fellow students. What was her ethnicity? Where was she from?
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Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think
"It’s not true that no one needs you anymore.” These words came from an elderly woman sitting behind me on a late-night flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. The plane was dark and quiet. A man I assumed to be her husband murmured almost inaudibly in response, something to the effect of “I wish I was dead.” Again, the woman: “Oh, stop saying that.” ... According to research by Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis and one of the world’s leading experts on the trajectories of creative careers, success and productivity increase for the first 20 years after the inception of a career, on average.
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Cannabis Users See Low Risk in Driving High
As marijuana restrictions loosen up, behavioral researchers are finding that some drivers believe driving under the influence of cannabis poses fewer risks than driving while drunk.
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Does psychology have a conflict-of-interest problem?
Generation Z has made Jean Twenge a lot of money. As a psychologist at San Diego State University in California, she studies people born after the mid-1990s, the YouTube-obsessed group that spends much of its time on Instagram, Snapchat and other social-media platforms. Thanks to smartphones and sharing apps, Generation Z has grown up to be more narcissistic, anxious and depressed than older cohorts, she argues. Twenge calls them the ‘iGen’ generation, a name she says she coined. And in 2010, she started a business, iGen Consulting, “to advise companies and organizations on generational differences based on her expertise and research on the topic”.
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The Science Of Smiles, Real And Fake
The notion that you can smile your way to happiness is an enduring one. Back in the 1800s, Charles Darwin was among the first to come up with what modern scientists further developed into the "facial feedback hypothesis." That's the idea that smiling can make you happier and frowning can make you sadder or angrier — that changing your facial expression can intensify or even transform your mood. Dick Van Dyke sang about the phenomenon — and so did Nat King Cole. And it is still taught in psychology classes today. But researchers are now finding that this phenomenon may be more complicated than they once thought.
