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People Aren’t As Morally Superior As They Think They Are
It’s a famous thought experiment, popular at a certain kind of dinner party: “The Trolley Problem.” Let’s say you were given the job of operating the lever to a pair of train tracks on which a mine trolley is hurtling at breakneck speed. If you do nothing, the trolley will kill five people standing on the track it’s currently on. If you pull the lever, you’ll divert the trolley, and instead kill one person who is standing on the other track. The classic thinking holds that most people will let five people die rather than pull the lever, because the thought of deliberately killing one person — even to save five others — is intolerable to anyone with an ounce of empathy.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: The Common Time Course of Memory Processes Revealed John R. Anderson, Jelmer P. Borst, Jon M. Fincham, Avniel Singh Ghuman, Caitlin Tenison, and Qiong Zhang What happens in the short period of time during which someone retrieves a well-known fact? Anderson and colleagues used magnetoencephalography (MEG), a neuroimaging technique that allows the mapping of brain activity on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis, to identify the stages of generating answers from memory, their duration, and their brain location.
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When Moral Outrage Goes Viral, It Can Come Across as Bullying
People tend to view a social media comment that calls out offensive behavior positively, but not when it’s echoed by several other commenters.
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Young Adults Help Parents Instead of Friends When Forced to Choose
Findings from a risk-taking game show that, when forced to make a decision that benefits either a parent or a close friend, young adults are more likely to choose the parent.
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Why You Forget Names Immediately—And How to Remember Them
Of all the social gaffes, none is perhaps more common than meeting a new person, exchanging names and promptly forgetting theirs — forcing you to either swallow your pride and ask again, or languish in uncertainty forever. Why do we keep making this mistake? There are a few potential explanations, says Charan Ranganath, the director of the Memory and Plasticity Program at the University of California, Davis.
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The High School We Can’t Log Off From
It appears we’re in the midst of yet another Twitter backlash. Marquee users have been slowly backing away from their feeds (or slipping off the grid entirely); last week, Twitter’s stock plunged by more than 20 percent after the company reported a decline in monthly users. The arguments for defection are at this point familiar: Twitter is a dark reservoir of hatred, home to the diseased national id. It turns us into our worst selves — dehumanizing us, deranging us, keying us up, beating us down, turning us into shrieking outrage monkeys hellbent on the innocents of Oz.
