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New Content From Current Directions in Psychological Science
A sample of articles on close-relationships research, face processing, attentional control, cognitive-load theory, and open-source measures of cognitive ability.
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Stereotypes Harm Black Lives and Livelihoods, but Research Suggests Ways to Improve Things
The Black Lives Matter protests shaking the world have thankfully brought renewed attention not just to police brutality but to the broader role of racism in our society. Research suggests some roots of racism lie in the stereotypes we hold about different groups. And those stereotypes can affect everything from the way police diagnose danger to who gets interviewed for jobs to which students get attention from professors. Negative stereotypes harm Black Americans at every turn. To reduce their pernicious effects, it’s important to first understand how stereotypes work and just how pervasive they are.
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Why Facing Our Feelings is Essential for Tackling Our Climate Crisis
Thirty years ago, I sat in a darkened lecture hall listening to what was happening to our Earth because of the decisions people had made. Climate change, toxic contamination, species loss, forest fires, soil depletion: it was a litany of all the ways humans had gone very wrong. At least, that's how it felt to me, at age 19. Human behavior was directly influencing the globe's weather patterns. It was almost unthinkable. Apparently, it was so unthinkable for those around me -- that people were literally not thinking about it. ... We are seeing huge numbers of people starting to bravely name their feelings, openly: I am scared. I feel overwhelmed. I feel powerlessness. I feel angry.
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Does a Pie Chart Change Who You Are?
23andMe’s senior director of research, Joanna Mountain, says she’s long wondered how recreational DNA testing affects our thinking about genetic differences. This is more than a mere academic concern. More than than 30 million people have spit into vials or swabbed their cheeks in an ongoing search for family, history, and identity that has transformed America into a nation of seekers in recent years, and 23andMe’s database contains about a third of them. We test to find genetic relatives and to get those little ethnicity pie charts that promise to tell us how Irish, Korean, or Nigerian we are.
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Best Way to Stop Cheating in Online Courses? ‘Teach Better’
Students cheat more in online courses -- right? Most professors certainly think so. Sixty percent of the nearly 2,000 respondents to Inside Higher Ed's 2019 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology last fall said they believed academic fraud occurs more frequently in online than in face-to-face courses (remember those?). And 93 percent of respondents to a recent survey by Wiley said they believed students were significantly more likely (62 percent) or more likely to cheat in an online course than in a face-to-face course.
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Americans Are Determined to Believe in Black Progress
APS Member/Author: Jennifer Richeson For two days in early June, as America was erupting in sustained protests over the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, by police in Minneapolis, the most watched movie on Netflix was The Help. The 2011 film—which depicts Black servants working in affluent white households in 1960s Mississippi, and centers on a white female journalist—won acclaim in some quarters. But it has also been criticized as a sentimental and simplistic portrayal of racism—and redemption—amid the cruelties of Jim Crow. To ask what was going on here—why people started watching The Help at a moment of deep racial trauma—is to risk tumbling down a rabbit hole.
