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Why Trying to Be Less Awkward Never Works
You know that thing where someone is walking toward you, and you move one way but so do they, then you move the other way but so do they, and you repeat this dance until, inevitably, one of you says, “Shall we dance?” Awkward moments like these can be panic-inducing, and judging by the number of books and articles and videos on awkwardness that have popped up in recent years, this is far from a unique worry. So many of these try to help by offering outrageously specific advice. Don’t let a conversational silence last longer than four seconds.
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Why are people prejudiced? The answer is not what you think
People are prejudiced -- sometimes unashamedly so. We tend to have a host of reasons ready to justify our biases -- the mentally ill are dangerous, immigrants steal jobs, the LGBTQ community corrupts family values, Muslims are terrorists and rural whites are uneducated. But these prejudices are largely unfounded and the justifications don't hold water, so what is driving them in the first place? In the December Nature: Human Behavior, we -- with colleagues Julia Marshall and Yimeng Wang -- report a basic root of social prejudice: People's dislike of broken patterns.
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Anne Treisman, Who Studied How We Perceive, Dies at 82
Anne M. Treisman, whose insights into how we perceive the world around us provided some of the core theories for the field of cognitive psychology, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 82. Her daughter Deborah Treisman said the cause was a stroke after a long illness. --- “Applied psychological scientists have relied on her work to help improve operations ranging from traffic signal design to airport baggage inspection,” the Association for Psychological Science wrote in an online memorial. The phenomena she examined are experienced by people every day, though they don’t realize it.
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When Did Marriage Become So Hard?
No one will deny that marriage is hard. In fact, there's evidence it's getting even harder. Eli Finkel, a social psychologist at Northwestern University, argues that's because our expectations of marriage have increased dramatically in recent decades. "[A] marriage that would have been acceptable to us in the 1950s is a disappointment to us today because of those high expectations," he says. The flip side of that disappointment, of course, is a marriage that's pretty amazing. Those of us who can meet the high expectations of modern marriage, Finkel says, may find "a level of marital fulfillment that was out of reach until pretty recently."
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What Makes Something Funny?
Humor can be dissected, as a frog can,” E. B. White wrote, “but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.” True to form, philosophers, scientists, and certain left-brained comedians have been scrutinizing humor’s innards for centuries, seeking a serious understanding of what makes things funny. According to one scholarly definition, something is humorous if people cognitively appraise it as funny, if it creates “the positive emotion of amusement,” or if it produces laughter. But while the average adult laughs 18 times a day, laughter isn’t a reliable indicator.
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A New Goal: Aim To Be Less Wrong
At a conference last week, I received an interesting piece of advice: "Assume you are wrong." The advice came from Brian Nosek, a fellow psychology professor and the executive director of the Center for Open Science. Nosek wasn't objecting to any particular claim I'd made — he was offering a strategy for pursuing better science, and for encouraging others to do the same. To understand the context for Nosek's advice, we need to take a step back — to the nature of science itself, and to a methodological revolution that's been shaking the field of psychology. You see, despite what many of us learned in elementary school, there is no single scientific method.
