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Gender Bias Sways How We Perceive Competence in Faces
Faces that are seen as competent are also perceived as more masculine, research reveals.
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New Research From Psychological Science
A sample of research exploring how trait anxiety relates to attention, how choosing different career paths may shape personality development, and how attentional selection contributes to risky decision making.
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Spoiler Alert! The Psychology Of Surprise Endings
Writers and filmmakers hoping to hoodwink their fans with plot twists have long known what cognitive scientists know: All of us have blind spots in the way we assess the world. We get distracted. We forget how we know things. We see patterns that aren't there. Because these blind spots are wired into the brain, they act in ways that are predictable — so predictable that storytellers from Sophocles to M. Night Shyamalan have used them to lead us astray. In recent years, some scientists have begun to ask, can stories serve as a kind of brain scan?
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Superman May Inspire Altruistic Behavior
For all their box-office success, superheroes haven't gotten much respect of late. A 2017 study reported that preschoolers who identify with superheroes tend to be more aggressive than their peers. Numerous pop-culture commentators, including Bill Maher, argue that these characters share some blame for the presidency of Donald Trump, citing superheroes' advocacy of vigilantism, and the comic-book message that only one extraordinary man can save us. But new research suggests that the Man of Steel may have been maligned: It reports that people exposed to images of Superman were more likely than others to engage in helpful behavior. "Heroes loom large as exemplars of morality.
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Your Dog May Not Be a Genius, after All
If you are convinced your dog is a genius, you may be disappointed in the conclusions of a study just published in the journal Learning and Behavior.The study finds that dogs are cognitively quite ordinary when compared to other carnivores, domestic animals, and social hunters. “There is no current case for canine exceptionalism,” the authors conclude. That we think otherwise is not surprising.
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Fear of Disloyalty Drives Anti-Immigrant Bias
Fear of immigrants remains such a potent force in American life that the Republican Party is overtly relying on it in advance of the mid-term elections. But why, exactly, do so many people see a newcomer to the nation and perceive a threat? New research suggests it's a matter of perceived loyalty. The latest findings report that immigrants who see themselves—or are viewed as—having dual identities are less likely to be seen as people who can be depended upon if and when the country finds itself in a crunch. "Humans are acutely attuned to the loyalty of newcomers," writes a research team led by psychologist Jonas Kunst of Yale University and the University of Oslo.
