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<em>Perspectives</em> Provides Strategies for Maximizing Informational Value of Research
It’s an exhilarating time in psychological science, as momentum continues to build toward improving research standards and practices across the field. A special section in the November issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science is part of an ongoing effort to involve researchers in this movement by providing a set of cutting-edge strategies that can be used to improve the way research is conducted and evaluated.
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Cornell’s Stephen Ceci on Changing Landscape for Women in Academic Science
Psychological scientist Stephen Ceci is the H. L. Carr Chaired Professor of Developmental Psychology at Cornell University. His research focuses on a range of subjects, including cognitive development of children’s memory, intelligence, and women and academic science. Below is a Q&A with Ceci on his recent report, Women in Academic Science: A Changing Landscape, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. What advice, if any, would you give parents to encourage their daughters on a path to the fields of geoscience, engineering, economics, mathematics, and physical sciences (GEEMP)?
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Extremist Groups Appeal to Those Uncertain About Identity
In a world threatened by extremist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Boko Haram, many people wonder what pull such violent, fear-mongering organizations have over their followers. In a new Current Directions in Psychological Science article, APS Fellow Michael A. Hogg, describes a theory explaining why people with no previous record of violence or extremist views might be joining these causes. Hogg proposes that “uncertainty-identity theory” — the role uncertainty plays in motivating people to join a social group to feel accepted — could be a contributing factor pushing people toward fringe groups — whether ideological, religious, or political.
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Infants Can Tell If You’re a Reliable Informant
It’s hard to know how babies think, since they’re still getting a handle on language skills. One strategy that researchers use to gain some insight is eye tracking, which allows them to see where babies direct their gaze and for how long. In light of research suggesting that children trust other people’s testimony based on prior experience with them, psychological scientist Kristen Swan Tummeltshammer of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London and colleagues conducted two experiments to determine whether infants could discern a person’s trustworthiness and act on this knowledge — a crucial skill for successful learning.
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Memrise Prize Aimed at Spurring Innovations in Language Learning
David Shanks and Rosalind Potts, scientists in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London, United Kingdom, have teamed up with the online learning community Memrise to tackle an age-old problem: how to learn a new language — fast. The $10,000 Memrise Prize challenges contestants to “create the most powerful methodology for memorizing new information.” Contestants will devise a 1-hour learning program to teach English speakers previously unfamiliar Lithuanian vocabulary. Those programs that perform well against a control method will pass to the next round of the contest to be reviewed by independent judges, including experts on memory and neuroscience.
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APS Announces Third Replication Project
DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS EXTENDED TO 9 JANUARY
Two months after APS published its first Registered Replication Report (RRR), the plan for the third RRR has been finalized and editors are accepting proposals from researchers who would like to participate in the large-scale replication by running the study in their lab. Roy Baumeister and colleagues (1998; Muraven, Tice, & Baumeister, 1998) proposed that performance on tasks requiring self-control is governed by a general, unitary, and finite "internal" resource.
