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Evil: Is It Us or All Around Us?
Psychological scientist Philip Zimbardo reflected on his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment with Jon Stewart in a past episode of the Daily Show. In 1971, twelve students were randomly assigned to the roles of a prisoner or a guard in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Within 36 hours, the students displayed characteristics of abusive guards and pathological criminals. The experiment was supposed to run for 2 weeks, but it ended after only 6 days. In this clip, Zimbardo also discusses his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil and explains how our environments can affect our actions.
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Lying Becomes Difficult as We Age
In case you missed it, the cameras were rolling at the APS 23rd Annual Convention in Washington, DC. Watch Janice Murray from the University of Otago, New Zealand present her poster research, “Age, Lies, and Faces: Emotion Recognition Mediates Age-Related Differences.” Murray and her colleagues asked younger and older participants to identify facial emotion expressions and determine whether younger and older speakers’ opinion statements were true or false. The scientists discovered that older adults were less convincing liars and had more difficulty detecting others’ lies.
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Beauty in the Brain of the Beholder
Why is it that what one art critic considers a masterpiece looks like a child’s finger painting to someone else? Psychological scientists are looking for answers by analyzing art, society, and the human brain. In a paper published in March 2011 by the Journal of Cognitive Psychology, Annukka K. Lindell and Julia Mueller review scientific research addressing subjective visual art appreciation. While Lindell and Mueller acknowledge that science may never be able to predict anyone’s reaction to a piece of art with complete accuracy, they also report that studying the psychology of visual art has allowed scientists to understand which variables contribute to our preferences.
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Travel Grant to South Africa for the 30th International Congress of Psychology
The APA-USNC International Travel and Mentoring Program for US scholars announces a call for applications to attend the 30th International Congress of Psychology held in Cape Town, South Africa from July 22-27, 2012.
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Worried? Get Your Scrub On
Global Handwashing Day (October 15, 2011) may be on to something! If you’re feeling guilty or doubtful, simply washing your hands or taking a shower may make you feel better. In a literature review published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwartz concluded that “people can rid themselves of a sense of immorality, lucky or unlucky feelings, or doubt about a decision” by cleaning themselves. In one study, scientists found that people asked to judge the moral wrongdoing of others saw them as worse when exposed to an unkempt room or bad odor than when sitting in a clean room.
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<em>Better Angels</em>, Believe It or Not
Two World Wars, the Cold War, and the rise of terrorism must make the past century one of the most violent in the history of our species, right? Not according to Harvard psychologist and APS member Steven Pinker, who argues in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, that violence is declining. According to Pinker, we are actually living in the most peaceful era in human history. Watch Pinker’s TED talk on the myth of violence to learn more about why Pinker thinks our “better angels” are winning out. You can learn more about Pinker’s by reading coverage from The New York Times and Time.
