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Let’s Make a Deal: The Psychological Science Underlying Compromise and Negotiation
Tense negotiations in Congress over the “fiscal cliff” have focused public attention on the art of compromise -- or lack thereof. From deciding who washes the dishes to figuring out how to avoid the fiscal cliff, life experience shows us that achieving compromise is rarely easy. But why is give and take so difficult even when the consequences of failure are dire? We may like to believe that we are fair and levelheaded negotiators, but science tells us that successful give and take is often more difficult than we anticipate.
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Warum Kinder zu gehen beginnen (How do you learn to walk?)
ORF Austria: Warum stehen Kleinkinder eigentlich auf, wenn sie die Welt auch krabbelnd gut erkunden können? Weil sie beim Gehen schneller vorankommen, berichten US-Forscherinnen - eine nur scheinbar banale Erkenntnis. In der bisher umfangreichsten Studie zum Thema haben sie einige erstaunliche Details entdeckt. Die Psychologin Karen Adolph vom Infant Action Lab der New York University und Kolleginnen haben das Verhalten von 150 Kleinkindern im Alter zwischen 12 und 19 Monaten intensiv untersucht. Per Videokamera dokumentierten sie die Bewegungen von zwei Gruppen in einem Spielzimmer - die einen waren "Profikrabbler", die anderen "Gehneulinge".
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Cleaning Up Science
The New Yorker: A lot of scientists have been busted recently for making up data and fudging statistics. One case involves a Harvard professor who I once knew and worked with; another a Dutch social psychologist who made up results by the bushel. Medicine, too, has seen a rash of scientific foul play; perhaps most notably, the dubious idea that vaccines could cause autism appears to have been a hoax perpetrated by a scientific cheat. A blog called RetractionWatch publishes depressing notices, almost daily. One recent post mentioned that a peer-review site had been hacked; others detail misconduct in dentistry, cancer research, and neuroscience. And that’s just in the last week.
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A New Focus on the ‘Post’ in Post-Traumatic Stress
The New York Times: Psychological trauma dims tens of millions of lives around the world and helps create costs of at least $42 billion a year in the United States alone. But what is trauma, exactly? Both culturally and medically, we have long seen it as arising from a single, identifiable disruption. You witness a shattering event, or fall victim to it — and as the poet Walter de la Mare put it, “the human brain works slowly: first the blow, hours afterward the bruise.” The world returns more or less to normal, but you do not.
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Could the right go green?
The Boston Globe: People tend to think of morality along one dimension: good versus bad. But recent scholarship by Jonathan Haidt and others has identified that there can be multiple moral values commanding our attention—namely “harm/care,” “fairness/reciprocity,” “in-group/loyalty,” “authority/respect,” and “purity/sanctity”—and has shown that liberals are more focused on harm/care while conservatives are more focused on the others. A new study applies this moral framework to environmental politics and reveals that conservatives aren’t necessarily more opposed to environmental action; it depends how that action is framed. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
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New Research on Visual Perception and Attention From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research on visual perception and attention from Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. When What You Hear Influences When You See: Listening to an Auditory Rhythm Influences the Temporal Allocation of Visual Attention Jared E. Miller, Laura A. Carlson, and J. Devin McAuley Can the things we hear affect the ways we allocate visual attention? In the first of three experiments, participants watched a screen while listening to an auditory rhythm. A white dot appeared in a corner of the screen in synch, slightly out of synch, or very out of synch with the final auditory tone.