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Want to Avoid a Heated Argument? This Trick Could Help
Debate a friend about vaccines, politics, or even who’ll win the Super Bowl this year, and it rarely ends well. Each of you is so entrenched in your positions—and so sure of your convictions—that the most likely outcome is an argument. But what if both of you reflected on your values before you started bickering—how much you treasure loyalty or equality, for example? You’d boost your “intellectual humility,” your openness to being wrong, according to a new study. And that, in turn, might lead to a more civil conversation—and possibly even an agreement.
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Personality Can Change From One Hour to the Next
Psychologists use personality traits such as extroversion, neuroticism or anxiety as a means of characterizing typical patterns of thought, emotion and behavior that differ from one person to the next. From this perspective, the constituents of personality consist of a collection of relatively stable traits that are hard to change. But the assumption that you can routinely measure these traits using questionnaires that identify typical behavior has come into question in the past two decades. It is not only that behavioral changes happen often but that they occur from day to day and hour to hour. Someone could be open and agreeable at noon but negative and rigid at two o’clock.
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Pessimism Is the One Thing Americans Can Agree On
Are Americans cockeyed optimists or incorrigible pessimists? Do they think that American society has improved or gotten worse in various ways—and how accurate are their views? You might imagine that the answer would be nuanced, that it would depend on factors like people’s politics or news-consuming habits. But the answer isn’t nuanced at all, according to a new study. In research published earlier this year in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, Gregory Mitchell at the University of Virginia and Philip Tetlock at the University of Pennsylvania looked at these questions empirically.
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Black Women’s Childhood Symptoms of Disordered Eating Predict Symptoms in Adulthood
New research finds that childhood symptoms of disordered eating are predictive of symptoms in adulthood regardless of race, debunking the myth that eating disorders don’t affect Black women.
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New Content From Perspectives on Psychological Science
A sample of articles on assessing and mitigating bias in AI applications for mental health, investigating coping vs. thriving, exploring mnemicity attribution as a cognitive gadget, and much more.
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The Reason Food off Someone Else’s Plate Always Seems to Taste Better, According to Science
“Can I try that?” “Are you going to eat that?” Part of the appeal in eating out is in not having to spend the time or effort preparing food or cleaning up after yourself. But there’s another, more subtle benefit: Food that comes off your dining partner’s plate invariably seems to taste exceptionally good. In some cases, even better than whatever you ordered. And there’s a good reason for that. For a 2014 paper published in the journal Psychological Science [PDF], researchers at Yale enlisted 23 undergraduate students and gave them a rather pleasant scientific objective.
