social cognition
ddobbs | February 13, 2009Dangerous concept; successful execution: From the mediea team at Small Mammal, a cute video story that deconstructs a cute YouTube video to look at the science of cuteness.
Somebody run tell Liz Spikol!
mixingmemory | July 9, 2008I've been meaning to post about this set of studies for a while, but because it's relevant to Chapter 4 of Lakoff's The Political Mind, I figured I'd better get around to it before I write the review of that chapter.
It's been a while, but in the past, I've talked a lot about new theories of moral judgment, and Jonathan Haidt's social intuitionist model in particular. Under Haidt's view, moral judgments are largely intuitive (that is, unconscious, automatic, and non-deliberative), and instead of being based on ethical principles, which we use mostly for post-hoc rationalization, they're…
mixingmemory | June 11, 2008
"They only care about themselves," "They're out of touch with reality," "They don't become academics." These are just some of the answers people yelled at me yesterday when I read out loud the title of a paper in the June issue of Psychological Science. My answer was "some of each."
Oh, the paper, by Napier and Jost(1), is titled "Why are conservatives happier than liberals?" (duh!), and was inspired by the Pew Research Center study from a couple years ago, which naturally got a bunch of media and blog attention, in which 47% of conservative Republicans said they were "very happy," as…
mixingmemory | May 9, 2008Who 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 begins with Judges 12:5-6 as an epigraph. In that passage, group membership is determined by having individuals pronounce a word, and if they can't pronounce it properly, they're killed. Kinzler et al. then provide a host of examples of what we might call linguistic discrimination in their opening paragraph:
The biblical story of Shibboleth speaks of the…
mixingmemory | March 16, 2008That'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 circumstances, going to read another imaging study. If you read my last post, or have been hanging around here for a while, you may have realized that I'm not a big fan of cognitive neuroscience. More often than not (I'd argue, always), you can learn the same thing and more by doing behavioral studies, and in most cases it'll cost you several hundred dollars less per participant. For…
mixingmemory | February 17, 2008I'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 atheist friends and acquaintances are that religion is a fantasy designed to explain the mysterious and otherwise unexplainable, and that religion is a fantasy designed to make people feel less alone in the universe. As those of you who've been reading Mixing Memory for a while may have noticed, these discussions have led me to be somewhat obsessed with understanding the…
mixingmemory | December 19, 2007As 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 for a while, you've probably guessed that one of my favorite topics in that research is stereotype threat. Stereotype threat is, according to Claude Steele(1, "the threat of being viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype or the fear of doing something that would inadvertently confirm that stereotype," and there's now a pretty substantial literature showing that…
mixingmemory | December 13, 2007I'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 in the December issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science (with a subscription, you can read it here, and if you don't have a subscription, you're missing out), and is titled "Measuring the Immeasurable: Or 'Could Abraham Lincoln Take the Implicit Association Test?'" Not to give anything away, but it turns out the answer to that question is a resoundingly tentative "…
mixingmemory | December 6, 2007Recently, 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 something, because we have all sorts of signals coming from the body, along with the brain's awareness of the signal's it's sending. But in some cases, particularly when bodily signals are ambiguous or absent, the "Whodunit" system can be tricked into thinking that someone else caused an action that was really of our own doing, or that we caused an action…
Women in Math, Science, and Engineering: Is It About the Numbers (And Not the Ones You Might Think)?
mixingmemory | October 15, 2007The 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 in math-heavy fields continues to grow at a steady pace, continually putting to lie many of his claims. This month's issue of Psychological Science contains two additions to that literature, one looking at the effect of experience on individual, and more importantly, gender differences in spatial attention, which is thought to be a…
mixingmemory | October 15, 2007Offered 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). The effect of the amount of blood in a violent video game on aggression, hostility, and arousa. Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Abstract
The current study utilized the General Aggression Model, with an emphasis on aggression-related priming, to explore the different effects on hostility, physiological arousal, and state aggression in those who…
mixingmemory | October 6, 2007If 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, and behind the often impenetrable barrier of the unconscious. Often when we're asked to make judgments, explain our actions, or assess our current motivational or emotional states, we're pretty much just guessing, and using what, from a third-person perspective, often seems like the least relevant information to do so.
One great illustration of this came in a classic…
mixingmemory | September 10, 2007Reading 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 issue of the journal will contain critical responses from Descartes, Malenbranche, and Eccles.
Seriously though, the paper by Amodio et al. takes as its launching point the large body of evidence that political conservatives and liberals differ on personality dimensions related to openness to experience, tolerance of uncertainty, and cognitive complexity…
mixingmemory | August 14, 2007A 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 up all over the media.
The study is pretty straightforward, though the data analysis must have taken forever. I'll let Parson's et al. tell you what they did:
There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball, with each team playing 162 games in each annual season. During a typical game each team's pitchers throw on average roughly 150 pitches, so that…
mixingmemory | June 6, 2007Originally 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 our intuitions about how people interpret political information (and by people, we mean other people, because our political decisions are all perfectly rational), and you don't have to look very far to see instances of motivated political reasoning. This week's news about Tom Delay, for example, has highlighted the fact that liberals are often all too ready…
mixingmemory | May 31, 2007The 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 belief. Political conservatism is associated with less openness to experience (as measured with Big Five inventories), and highly positively correlated with fear of uncertainty. Both relationships imply less creativity. However, only with a paper by Stephen Dollinger(1) in press in the journal Personality and…
mixingmemory | April 23, 2007Have 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 thinking exactly that when I was told about the name-letter effect several years ago. The name-letter effect is the entirely unsurprising finding, first reported (as far as I know) by Nuttin1, that people prefer letters in their names, especially their first and last initials, over other letters. They also prefer numbers in their birth date over other numbers. Wow!…
mixingmemory | March 13, 2007It 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.
mixingmemory | March 12, 2007I 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; the stoners who listened to Pink Floyd's "The Wall" over and over and over again; the hipsters, who listened to what was the hip music of the time (grunge); and the "popular" kids who listened to pop, pop rock, and country (I went to high school in Nashville, where country music was the popular music). We all assumed that what a person listened to could tell you a lot about…
mixingmemory | March 6, 2007In 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 of data out there, and what is out there is easy to interpret in a variety of ways (as the back and forth about whether religion is in fact declining in the western world shows, for example). But scientists are really beginning to tackle some of the more difficult empirical questions about religion. The going is slow, because religion is a vague term, religions are varied, and…