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Across the U.S., Families are Having Tough Talks About Racism
One night in late May, Wendy Bohon and her mom were piecing a puzzle together at the dining room table when they heard from the living room a news anchor’s somber voice, prepping his audience for what they were about to see. Bohon knew the general details of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, the way his neck was pinned to the concrete by a white police officer for nearly nine minutes. But she hadn’t yet watched the video that would soon ignite a national uprising. And she didn’t know what her mom, a fifth-generation Virginian, might say about it. The mother and daughter got up from the table, stood behind Bohon’s dad in his rocking chair, and watched.
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Adding Value and Solving Problems: Virtual Networking for Scientists
Techniques and strategies for making connections remotely, identifying pain points, and building collaborations with your future colleagues.
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Don’t Be Afraid to Virtue Signal — It Can Be a Powerful Tool to Change People’s Minds
The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Rayshard Brooks offer new reminders of ongoing anti-black violence, and have outraged millions. This time, though, calls for justice have spread further than usual—around the world and across our culture. Public sentiment has changed dramatically—in two weeks, American voters’ support for Black Lives Matter increased as much as it did in the previous two years, and BLM is now one of the most popular political entities in the country. Symbolic change is also surging. Statues of bigots and slavers have toppled in Antwerp and Virginia.
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Among People Facing Food Insecurity, Researchers Find a Hidden Health Issue: Eating Disorders
When Carolyn Black Becker, a psychologist who studies eating disorders, used to explain her research to colleagues, she would get blank stares. The field, after all, was disproportionately focused on young girls and women who were underweight, white, and from middle-class families. Becker herself had spent most of her career focused on the prevention of eating disorders among sorority members. In that light, her decision to study eating disorders in people who were facing food insecurity — that is, people without reliable access to sufficient food — seemed unusual, even bizarre to some. “Everybody looked at me like I had two heads,” Becker recalled.
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The Questions That Will Get Me Through the Pandemic
In quarantine, one day smears into the next. To fight that unmoored feeling, psychologists recommend establishing a routine. The former astronaut Scott Kelly says that such a regimen helped him get through his time on the International Space Station, watching multiple sunrises a day as he orbited Earth. For the past 40 years, the historian Robert Caro has written alone in his office, but maintained a daily structure to combat his instinct to procrastinate.* “I do everything I can to make myself remember this is a job,” he told NPR's Steve Inskeep. “I keep a schedule.
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The Mind Of The Village: Understanding Our Implicit Biases
Podcast interview with APS Member Mahzarin Banaji Where do our minds live? A simple, scientific response would be to say our minds live in our brains. But Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji says we should not think of our minds as being solitary. "The individual mind sits in society. And the connection between mind and society is an extremely important one that should not be forgotten." Banaji is one of the creators of the Implicit Association Test, a widely-used tool for measuring a person's implicit biases. She says it's important to acknowledge that problems rooted in prejudice cannot be solved by finger pointing.
