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Science Shows How Students Can Stop Sweating Statistics
A pair of psychological scientists review the state of research on statistics anxiety and outline several ways for instructors to help reduce students’ worries.
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What’s the Value of a Dollar? It Depends on How You Perceive Numbers
When it comes to how we value money, all dollars (or Euros or yen or pesos) are not created equal. If someone gives you three dollar bills and then offers a fourth, the prospect of getting that extra dollar is kind of exciting. But if someone offers you 33 dollar bills first, the additional dollar loses some of its luster. This is because the extra dollar in the first scenario has greater subjective value than the extra dollar in the second scenario, a phenomenon economists often call “diminishing marginal utility” (DMU). If you were to poll a bunch of people and map out the subjective value of each additional dollar, the values would take a curvilinear shape.
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Social Processes in Daily Life
Michael Roche and his coauthors studied social processes and how they play out in daily life. In their study, college students with a high-dependency or a low-dependency personality reported how agentic (dominant vs. submissive) and communally (friendly vs. unfriendly) they behaved towards others, and how agentic and communally others behaved towards them during a one week period. High-dependency and low-dependency participants were similarly agentic towards interaction partners that were highly communal, but high-dependency participants were much less agentic than low-dependency participants to interaction partners that were less communal.
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Piecing Together the Flight 370 Narrative
It’s been 13 days since the Malaysia Airlines flight vanished. In that time, there have been hundreds of news reports positing different theories about its whereabouts and its fate. But by virtue of the fact that the plane is still missing, each of those stories is based on circumstantial evidence -- no one truly knows what happened, and the leads and hypotheses that seemed plausible for Flight 370 a week ago have since changed. This is an especially trying situation for those with family or friends on board -- people who want nothing more than to hear a clear-cut story about the fate of their loved ones.
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How Science and Technology Can Help Each Other Flourish
Psychological science and technology stand side by side as two of the fastest-growing areas of interest in the world, yet they rarely intersect or interact to mutually benefit one another. This Presidential Cross-Cutting Theme program at the 2014 APS Annual Convention, May 22–25 in San Francisco, will feature three subpanels on behavioral genetics, mobile sensing, and social networks.
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Half a Century Later, Psychology Researchers Remember Kitty Genovese
Fifty years ago today, a young woman was killed walking home from work in a quiet neighborhood of Queens, New York. Over the span of an excruciating half hour, she cried out for help as her killer maimed and stabbed her. And though there were people around who heard her calls, no one came to her aid and the police weren’t notified until it was too late. This is the story of Kitty Genovese’s death, perhaps the most well-known parable in psychology to emerge in the last century.
