-
Behaviors We Don’t Know We Have – Insights from Psychological Science
Understanding human behavior – why and how people do what they do – is at the very heart of psychological science. New research presented in the June issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science examines the processes that underlie various aspects of human behavior, exploring how we learn patterns in language and vision, why some people are able to overcome significant life stressors, and how humans process reward and fear. Statistical Learning: From Acquiring Specific Items to Forming General Rules Richard N. Aslin and Elissa L. Newport Statistical learning is the process by which adults and infants extract patterns embedded in both language and visual input.
-
Sex and Trauma Research Is Less Upsetting to College Students Than Previously Assumed
Research on sex and trauma faces an ethical dilemma: how can we find out more about the effects of such psychologically sensitive topics without hurting the people who participate in the study? Institutional review boards that approve research on human subjects believe that asking people about sex and trauma is riskier and more distressing than asking people to complete standard intelligence tests or personality questionnaires.
-
When Equality Loses
Despite our inclination to believe equality within a team or group is important, new research suggests that a built-in hierarchy leads to fewer group conflicts and higher productivity. The research finds a team or group with all high-performers will not outperform teams or groups with an established hierarchy. Teams in which everyone has high power are likely to experience elevated levels of conflict, reduced role differentiations, less coordination and integration, and poorer productivity than teams with a broader distribution of power and status.
-
People Know When to Move On
People make decisions all the time. What sandwich to order, whether to walk through that puddle or around it, what school to go to and so on. However, psychologists disagree on how good we are at making decisions. “In the literature on human decision-making, there are two almost parallel stories,” said Andreas Jarvstad of Cardiff University. “One goes, ‘humans are terrible at making choices.’ The other goes, ‘humans are close to being as good as they possibly can be.’” Jarvstad is an author of a new study on decision-making published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. His study is about choosing how long to spend on the task at hand.
-
Questionable Research Practices Surprisingly Common
Not all scientific misconduct is flat-out fraud. Much falls into the murkier realm of “questionable research practices.” A new study finds that in one field, psychology, these practices are surprisingly common. The survey of more than 2,000 research psychologists, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that most have engaged in at least one of the questionable practices at some point in their career. “There have been some very widely publicized cases of outright fraud,” says Leslie K. John of Harvard Business School.
-
Psychological Science Explains Uproar over Prostate-Cancer Screenings
WASHINGTON— The uproar that began last year when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force stated that doctors should no longer offer regular prostate-cancer tests to healthy men continued this week when the task force released their final report. Overall, they stuck to their guns, stating that a blood test commonly used to screen for prostate cancer, the PSA test, causes more harm than good -- it leads men to receive unnecessary, and sometimes even dangerous, treatments. But many people simply don’t believe that the test is ineffective.