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Kids Come to Like Their Own Before They Dislike “Outsiders”
Social groups form along all sorts of lines -- from nationality to age to shared interests, and everything in between. We come to identify with our groups, whichever those might be, to the point where we prefer people who belong to our groups and discriminate against those who don't. These group affiliations undoubtedly confer tangible and intangible benefits, but those benefits often come at a cost to members of other so-called out-groups. Given the consequences for human societies, researchers David Buttelman and Robert Bohm of the University of Erfurt in Germany set out to investigate the early origins of intergroup discrimination.
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European Association for Behavior Analysis Conference
The 7th biannual conference of the European Association for Behaviour Analysis (EABA) will be held in Stockholm, Sweden from September 10 through 13, 2014. Visit the EABA website to submit a paper, poster, or symposium or to view conference details.
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Busted Bracket? Science Suggests Strategy to Improve March Madness Picks
It’s official: No one on this planet will walk away with Warren Buffett’s $1 billion dollar prize for filling out a perfect March Madness bracket. Hopes for the money were quickly dashed after the second round of games in the NCAA college basketball tournament – Dayton topped Syracuse, Stanford snuffed out Kansas, and Kentucky ended Wichita State’s hopes for the first perfect NCAA season in almost 40 years. Suffice it to say, we all made wrong picks in one way or another. It’s likely that some people will blame their mistakes on the bracket “gurus” – those experts who allegedly know the ins and outs of each game in extraordinary detail.
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Science Shows How Students Can Stop Sweating Statistics
A pair of psychological scientists review the state of research on statistics anxiety and outline several ways for instructors to help reduce students’ worries.
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What’s the Value of a Dollar? It Depends on How You Perceive Numbers
When it comes to how we value money, all dollars (or Euros or yen or pesos) are not created equal. If someone gives you three dollar bills and then offers a fourth, the prospect of getting that extra dollar is kind of exciting. But if someone offers you 33 dollar bills first, the additional dollar loses some of its luster. This is because the extra dollar in the first scenario has greater subjective value than the extra dollar in the second scenario, a phenomenon economists often call “diminishing marginal utility” (DMU). If you were to poll a bunch of people and map out the subjective value of each additional dollar, the values would take a curvilinear shape.
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Social Processes in Daily Life
Michael Roche and his coauthors studied social processes and how they play out in daily life. In their study, college students with a high-dependency or a low-dependency personality reported how agentic (dominant vs. submissive) and communally (friendly vs. unfriendly) they behaved towards others, and how agentic and communally others behaved towards them during a one week period. High-dependency and low-dependency participants were similarly agentic towards interaction partners that were highly communal, but high-dependency participants were much less agentic than low-dependency participants to interaction partners that were less communal.
