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Suspect Line Up
ABC Catalyst: There are two major problems. One is when the witness to the crime is asked to come in and look at a line up they come with quite strong expectations that the bad guy is going to be in the line up and it’s their job to find them. But the second one is the witness almost certainly is going to have a less than perfect memory. They’ve seen an event that they probably didn’t know was going to happen. They’ve seen it under not so great conditions. Then they’re asked to make a decision, a yes/no decision that says, yep that person was the bad guy or that person is not. A decision which has enormous consequences. Read the whole story: ABC Catalyst
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Slow Thinking Is Wise Thinking
Nobel Prize-winning psychological scientist Daniel Kahneman called US President Barack Obama a “slow thinker.” That may sound like an insult, but it’s actually high praise. In his latest book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes two types of thinkers. System 1 thinkers operate automatically and quickly, with little sense of voluntary control, and little or no effort. System 2 thinkers, however, allocate attention to mental activities that demand it, and they also tend to be more deliberative. Kahneman describes President Obama as a System 2 thinker. “He is a slow thinker. He deliberates,” Kahneman said in this CNN article. “He doesn't follow his gut immediately. He considers things.
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Psychological Scientists Honored for Improbable Research
For the second year in a row, research published in Psychological Science is being recognized with the, erm, prestigious Ig Nobel Psychology Prize for scientific achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” The jocular prizes, awarded annually for studies in a number of scientific fields, honors research that is unusual, imaginative, and spurs people's interest in science, medicine, and technology. This year’s Ig Nobel–winning research was published in the December 2011 issue of Psychological Science.
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Edward Maibach on the Sticky Problem of Misinformation
“When it’s really important to educate the public about an issue, the most reliable means we have is simple, clear messages repeated often by a variety of trusted sources,” says Edward Maibach, Director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. Maibach wrote the introduction to the latest issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (PSPI), which features a report on misinformation by Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Western Australia, Australia) and four coauthors.
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Truthiness Explained
Truthiness — it’s what satirist Stephen T. Colbert calls “the truth that you feel in your gut, regardless of what the facts support.” Now APS Member Eryn J. Newman, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, is taking a closer look at what really happens when we “think with our guts.” In research published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Newman and her coauthors showed that when a decorative photo appeared alongside statements, such as “The liquid metal inside a thermometer is magnesium,” people were more likely to agree with the statements, even when the statements were false.
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Who (and What) Can You Trust? How Non-Verbal Cues Can Predict a Person’s (and a Robot’s) Trustworthiness
People face this predicament all the time—can you determine a person’s character in a single interaction? Can you judge whether someone you just met can be trusted when you have only a few minutes together? And if you can, how do you do it? Using a robot named Nexi, Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno and collaborators Cynthia Breazeal from MIT’s Media Lab and Robert Frank and David Pizarro from Cornell University have figured out the answer. The findings will be published in the journal Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
