social cognition
mixingmemory | February 27, 2007If 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 passages from the Bible in which God sanctions violence than after reading passages that don't involve sanctioning violence. In the study, two sets of participants, one from Brigham Young University, and the other from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, were told that they would be participating in two seprate studies. After being asked a few questions about their…
mixingmemory | February 5, 2007There'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 other minds -- do young children? autistic children? chimpanzees? dolphins? elephants? -- and what that ability looks like. In most research on the subject, what people consider minds to be, and who they consider to have minds, has largely been taken for granted. While that doesn't mean we haven't learned anything about theory of mind, it does mean we may have missed some…
mixingmemory | January 22, 2007If 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) women find a man attractive depends, in part, on whether other women find him attractive, a phenomenon called mate choice copying.
In some animal species (guppies, quail, etc.), females sometimes pick mates based in part on the choices of other females, especially more experienced ones. If an experienced female guppy likes a male, then he's probably worth…
mixingmemory | December 13, 2006Humans 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 a particular crime is low, they'll assign harsher punishments to individuals who commit that crime1. Because the low conviction rate is perceived as a threat to social order, they take it out on the next person associated with that threat, even though increasing one person's punishment does nothing to actually affect the perceived threat. Since terrorism is clearly one…
mixingmemory | November 23, 2006One 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 that involves "labeling" the emotion based on context. Schacter and Singer's famous study involved giving participants either epinephrine or a placebo, and telling them that they were getting vitamin injections (I'm a sucker for studies with deception). The participants were told that the purpose of the study was to measure the effects of the vitamins…
mixingmemory | November 10, 2006Anytime 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 psychological aspects, but for some reason, I'd never really thought about studying it. Then I got an alert from ScienceDirect earlier this week that contained a paper titled "Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions" by Wildschut et al.1, and I was immediately fascinated. And since I know you are all fascinated by the things that fascinate me, I thought I'd write about it a little.…
mixingmemory | October 27, 2006By 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 nice job describing the study, and since I'm lazy, I'm not going to say anything about it for now. Instead, I'm going to give you a little background on stereotype threat and math performance by reposting something I wrote on the topic over at the old blog in the aftermath of the whole Larry Summers fiasco. Here it is in its entirety, from 7/19/2005.
Gender, Math,…
mixingmemory | October 23, 2006Psychologists 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 it:
From an evolutionary perspective, it's better to be safe than sorry regarding the detection of agency under conditions of uncertainty.
When it looks like there's a shape moving in the tall grass, it's better to infer agency and run away than end up being eaten by a lion when it jumps out of the grass. Thus,…
mixingmemory | September 27, 2006The 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 started by looking at some studies on TMT and cultural values and beliefs, because that's where TMT got its start. Recall that TMT says, in essence, that in order to avoid the fear that comes with thoughts of our own mortality, we erect and cling to belief and value systems. Thus, when we encounter things that make us thing about death, we cling all the more tightly to those…
mixingmemory | September 20, 2006I'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 say the name of a random social psychological theory, and another will then throw out the first thing that comes into his or her head. They'll write each of these down, and the associations will then become the basis for their next several research projects. OK, so that's probably not really what's going on, and I suppose there's a more scientific method to…
mixingmemory | July 12, 2006A 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 these why-are-you-gay studies is why do we have to know? I'm terrified that once someone targets a "reason" they're just going to try and find a way to do away with it.
To which fellow Science Blogger Janet added:
Pinning homosexuality on something (abnormal) from genetics or development comes dangerously close to making it a…
mixingmemory | July 10, 2006It'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 attempting to elucidate this role. I thought it might be interesting to say a little about this given the recent resurfacing of the Westen et al. study on motivated reasoning in politics. While the recent posts on the study have (unfortunately) described it in terms of confirmation bias, it would be more accurate to describe the study…
mixingmemory | July 7, 2006The 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 in general back in March, when the study was first noticed by the press and bloggers. I'm not exactly pleased to see the study popping up again, because it was so massively misinterpreted last time, with people making claims to the effect that the study demonstrated the impossibility of political persuasion. One reporter, writing about the paper…
mixingmemory | July 4, 2006It'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 behaviors, and current administration in particular, because instead of addressing the criticism, one simply has to say, "They're just saying that because the hate America." Still, I think some people have come to genuinely believe that people on the left hate America, and aren't using the label as a rhetorical device designed to disarm one's opponent. To these people, the…