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A Berkeley professor explains why society needs more troublemakers
It’s sweet to be agreeable—but what a vibrant, healthy society really needs is principled troublemakers. Those who dare to say “no” when it appears that everyone else is in agreement are rare and brave—and they make the world a better place, according to University of California, Berkeley psychology professor Charlan Nemeth. Her new book, In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business,shows how everyone benefits when someone presents a thoughtful contrarian view. Nemeth’s research in social psychology and cognition has shown that disagreement improves group thinking. “It’s a benefit regardless of whether or not [dissenters] hold the truth,” she argues.
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How Income Affects the Brain
We often attribute financial problems to bad life decisions: Why didn’t that person stay in college? Why didn’t they pick a more lucrative career? Why did they have so many kids? But several recent studies suggest that having less money can actually affect thinking and memory for the worse. In the most recent of these papers, scientists found a link between being lower on the socioeconomic ladder and changes in the brain. For this study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas scanned the brains of 304 people aged 20 to 89.
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We Should Teach All Students, in Every Discipline, to Think Like Scientists
If knowledge is power, scientists should easily be able to influence the behavior of others and world events. Researchers spend their entire careers discovering new knowledge—from a single cell to the whole human, from an atom to the universe. Issues such as climate change illustrate that scientists, even if armed with overwhelming evidence, are at times powerless to change minds or motivate action. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, people in the U.S., one of the countries that emits the most carbon, were among the least concerned about the potential impact of climate change. Why are so many Americans indifferent to this global threat? Yale University professor Dan M.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Iconic Memories Die a Sudden Death Michael S. Pratte Iconic memory is the sensory memory system that produces and stores visual information (icons) immediately after encountering it. Iconic memory maintains large amounts of unaltered visual information for brief periods of time. But how do items disappear from iconic memory? The author investigated whether items disappear from iconic memory because they gradually decay or because they entirely vanish in a sudden death. Participants saw 10 colored squares arranged in a circle for 200 ms.
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Psychological Research Shows How Biased We Are When It Comes To Female Leadership
Whether we like to confront it or not, our culture has shared unconscious biases of what each gender looks like in terms of qualities and abilities and how each gender should or should not behave. Because of this, our work is perceived differently - for better or worse - and our career paths, happiness and fulfillment are affected. One woman who is at the helm of sex bias research in the workplace is Madeline Heilman, a social and organizational psychologist who is Professor of Psychology at NYU. Madeline has been researching this topic for her entire career, and what she has seen in her research has not shifted a lot even with the incredible strides women have made in the workplace.
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Speaking a Second Language May Give Low-Income Kids a Boost
Children growing up in low-income homes score lower than their wealthier peers on cognitive tests and other measures of scholastic success, study after study has found. Now mounting evidence suggests a way to mitigate this disadvantage: learning another language. In an analysis published online in January in Child Development, Singapore Management University researchers probed demographic data and intellectual assessments from a subset of more than 18,000 kindergartners and first graders in the U.S.
