Social Cognition:
Who says religion and science can't go together well? I just read an interesting paper by Kinzler et al.(1), published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with apparent Biblical inspiration (OK, maybe not), as it...
Read on »
Posted on May 9, 2008 2:48 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
That's it! I'm never reading another imaging paper again, ever. OK, I might read one or two, and I might even post about them, but for now I'm telling myself, for my own sanity, that I'm never, ever, under any...
Read on »
Posted on March 16, 2008 9:43 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've been hanging out with fellow atheists for a while now, and one of the more common discussions I've had when the topic of religion comes up is, why are people religious? The two most common answers I've heard from...
Read on »
Posted on February 17, 2008 2:44 PM • 33 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As I believe I've said before, if anything good has come from the Larry Summers debacle of a few years ago, it's that it inspired some really interesting research on gender differences in math. If you've been reading this blog...
Read on »
Posted on December 19, 2007 4:05 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've blogged about some great papers in the past, but today I'm blogging about the best... paper... ever. It's by Arina K. Bones, of the University of Darache in Monte Carlo, and Navin R. Johnson of Opti Corp, was published...
Read on »
Posted on December 14, 2007 12:51 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Recently, several social psychologists have posited a "Whodunit" system in the brain that's always looking to assign authorship -- either our own or somebody else's -- to actions. Most of the time, it's pretty easy to tell when we've done...
Read on »
Posted on December 6, 2007 9:27 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The uproar surrounding Larry Summers' remarks on women in science and engineering, made almost three years ago (man, I'm getting old!) has died down, but the literature on social/environmental factors responsible, at least in part, for the large gender disparities...
Read on »
Posted on October 16, 2007 12:09 AM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Offered without comment (and sorry, only available with subscription; maybe I'll say something more about it later), except to say, why the hell am I not doing stuff with video games? Bartlett, C.P., Harrisa, R.J., & Brueya, C. (In Press)....
Posted on October 15, 2007 10:34 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that I'm fascinated by findings that show just how little we know about ourselves. Most of what's going on in our heads occurs below the level of awareness,...
Posted on October 6, 2007 9:39 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Reading an article in the LA Times today, I learned something exciting: political differences in thought happen in the brain. At least that's what a new study published in Nature Neuroscience(1) purports to show, though I hear that the next...
Read on »
Posted on September 10, 2007 8:58 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A few months ago, I posted about a study showing implicit racial bias in NBA referees' calls. Now it's baseball's turn, because yesterday reports of study by Parsons et al.1 that shows analogous results for home plate umpires began popping...
Read on »
Posted on August 14, 2007 2:59 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Originally posted on the old blog on 4/5/06, and reposted here and now out of laziness. It's easy to see why research on motivated political reasoning/cognition has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosophere lately. It fits nicely with...
Posted on June 6, 2007 9:11 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The belief that creativity and political conservatism are negatively correlated is widespread not only among the general public (except, maybe, among some conservatives), but among researchers in a variety of fields. And there are some indirect empirical justifications for this...
Read on »
Posted on May 31, 2007 9:12 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Have you ever read about a study, perhaps on this blog even, and thought to yourself, "Well those results are interesting in the lab, but they have absolutely no implications for life outside of the lab?" I remember quite clearly...
Read on »
Posted on April 23, 2007 4:00 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It turns out that Jeremy of PsyBlog is currently running a study on music and personality in the UK. So if you're reading this, and you live on one of those islands, you should go here and participate....
Posted on March 13, 2007 7:55 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I went to a high school at a time (one not that different from most others, I imagine) when musical preferences were a good clue to social group membership. There were, for example, the punks who listened to, well, punk;...
Read on »
Posted on March 12, 2007 9:29 AM • 55 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the discussion that resulted from the last couple posts on religion, a lot of claims have been made, all of which are empirical claims, and all of which thereby require data. But of course, there's not a whole lot...
Posted on March 6, 2007 4:23 PM • 34 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
If you were hanging around ScienceBlogs yesterday, you probably came across this post at Pharyngula. In it, Dr. Myers links to an article on a study by Bushman et al.1 purporting to show that people are more aggressive after reading...
Read on »
Posted on February 27, 2007 9:26 AM • 34 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's been a ton of research over the last decade or two on what is often called folk psychology or theory of mind (the latter is a bit theoretically loaded). That research concerns who has the ability to reason about...
Read on »
Posted on February 5, 2007 10:23 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
If you're a New Scientist reader, you may have come across this article titled "Beauty is in the eye of your friends." The brief article (which I found via 3 Quarks Daily) describes research purporting to show that whether (heterosexual)...
Read on »
Posted on January 22, 2007 9:13 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Humans are strange animals. We have such a deep need for social order that, when that order is threatened, we'll do irrelevant things in an effort to preserve it. For example, when people are told that the conviction rate for...
Read on »
Posted on December 13, 2006 8:54 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the more popular theories of emotion during the 60s and 70s was Schachter and Singer's two-factor theory1. The theory is pretty simple. As the name suggests, it states that emotions have two components: arousal and a cognitive component...
Read on »
Posted on November 23, 2006 9:46 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Anytime I hear songs from when I was in high school or college, I get very nostalgic. I remember people I knew, places I went, good times I had. It's a powerful and complex feeling, with all sorts of interesting...
Read on »
Posted on November 10, 2006 1:24 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
By now you've probably heard about the Dar-Nimrod and Heine study on stereotype threat and math performance in women. If you're interested in learning more about that study, check out Hugo's post at Alpha Psy. Since Hugo did such a...
Read on »
Posted on October 27, 2006 11:34 AM • 3 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Psychologists are now fairly confident that humans have an agency-detection mechanism, and an itchy agency-detection trigger finger. This is because the consequences of not detecting agency are often greater than those of agency-detection false positives. As Atran and Norenzayan put...
Read on »
Posted on October 23, 2006 2:10 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The other day, I talked about terror management theory (TMT) and modern art. That probably wasn't the best way to introduce TMT, because it's a bit of a stretch to turn TMT into an aesthetic theory. Instead, I should have...
Posted on September 27, 2006 8:40 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've never really hung out in a social psychology laboratory, but here is how I picture a typical day in one. There are some social psychologists sitting around, drinking some sort of exotic tea, and free associating. One psychologist will...
Read on »
Posted on September 20, 2006 8:10 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A couple weeks ago, a couple Science Bloggers, sparked by Jessica of Feministing, discussed the potential dangers of discovering the biological causes of homosexuality. Jessica expressed a common attitude in her post, writing: And naturally the larger question with all...
Read on »
Posted on July 12, 2006 9:07 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's been obvious to everyone who's written about politics since Aristotle that emotion plays an important role in political rhetoric and political judgment. With an increased focus on emotion in cognitive scientists, there has been a flourish of empirical work...
Posted on July 10, 2006 8:29 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Westen et al. study on the motivated reasoning of political partisons has made its way back into the blogosphere, first with Will Wilkerson, and now fellow Science Blogger Ed Brayton. I posted on the study, and hot cognition/motivated reasoning...
Posted on July 7, 2006 8:10 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's not uncommon these days to hear someone on the right side of the political spectrum refer to people on the left side as "America haters." It's a nice way to dismiss any criticism of the United States' policies or...
Read on »
Posted on July 4, 2006 6:22 PM • 12 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Cognitive stuff from a cognitive person. If you've got any requests, drop me an email. If it takes me a while to get to it, drop me another one.
