social
dmunger | February 6, 2007At a recent social psychology conference, one of the attendees kept an informal tally of how often presenters made negative statements about their own presentations. Out of 18 presenters, 11 made negative statements like
I've prepared a gosh-awful overhead
This is a gross oversimplification, or
We thought this study was pretty lame.
The statements weren't qualified in any way, just offered on their own as a preface to a portion of their presentation. Why would esteemed researchers find it worthwhile to make self-critical statements in front of their own colleagues? We're not talking here…
dmunger | January 17, 2007Here in North Carolina, for many sports fans, it's considered common knowledge that basketball referees don't call fouls against Duke. The reasons for the supposed bias vary from racism, to payoffs from wealthy alums, to the intimidating atmosphere at Duke's legendary Cameron Indoor Stadium, but nearly everyone in the state who's not a Duke fan seems to believe that the rich northerners at Duke University get all sorts of unfair advantages.
That said, accusations of bias in sports officials aren't limited to the Atlantic Coast Conference. Studies on home field advantage in Major League…
dmunger | January 10, 2007We've written a lot about video games and aggression here on CogDaily, and typically there has been heated discussion about the results. Why, commenters ask, aren't you talking about aggression in football players, or road rage, or in any of a thousand other situations? The most important reason is simply that we have a teenage son who loves video games, so we want to know if there's a negative impact of playing these games all the time.
But our commenters do have a point: a larger understanding of aggressive behavior and violence clearly goes beyond simply playing video games. There was…
dmunger | January 4, 2007This year's collegiate national football championship will be held in Phoenix, Arizona, at the usual home of the Arizona Cardinals. Neither competitor, Florida or Ohio State, is playing on its home field, so in principle the game should be an even match. Indeed, neither team has lost a home game this year, with Florida's lone loss coming at an away game in Auburn.
How big is the home field advantage? In the English Premier Football League (the other football), the home team wins 66 percent of the time. The home field advantage has been attributed to everything from understanding the local…
gmunger | December 28, 2006This is a guest post by Dominic Ippolito, one of my top student writers from Fall of 2006
Everyone knows a "perfectionist." We think of him or her as someone who strives for, and often attains, a high level of performance. But what are the psychological effects of this behavior? Psychologists categorize perfectionists according to two commonly accepted forms. Adaptive ('healthy') perfectionists set high standards for themselves, and use these goals to elicit their best effort. This form of perfectionism, measured by a subscale of the Almost Perfect Scale-Revised (APS-R), called the High…
gmunger | December 26, 2006This is a guest post by Anna Coon, one of my top student writers from fall 2006
If a baby is placed in a new, strange situation, a common reaction is to look to its mother. For example, whenever I met a new baby I was to babysit, she would always look to her mother at first, as if to get her mother's opinion on the potentially frightening situation. But why, exactly, is the baby looking to its mother? It might be for comfort in a novel situation, but it might also be to receive information. A team led by Trisha Striano has developed a study to test whether babies look to their mothers for…
dmunger | December 21, 2006Take a look at these two images. Do they belong in the same category or different categories?
You say the same? Wrong -- they're different! The one on the right is a little blurrier.
What about these two?
These are in the same category. Sure, the one on the right is still blurrier, but now it's rotated a bit, so that puts the two objects back in the same category. My rule for categorizing is complex, involving both blurriness and rotation (I'll explain how it works later on).
How do you think you would do if you were tested on these categories? Do you think you'd do better or worse if you…
dmunger | December 19, 2006As parents of a 15-year-old, Greta and I are very interested in what causes people to behave aggressively. We know a lot about specific causes of aggression -- violent media, testosterone, guns, and personal insults can all lead to aggressive behavior in certain circumstances. But kids and others exposed to one or more of these things don't necessarily become violent. Sometimes it seems that just the presence of his sister in the room can cause Jim to act more aggressively than he would otherwise.
That's one reason we were intrigued by a recent study by Jennifer Klinesmith, Tim Kasser, and…
dmunger | December 14, 2006I'm not bitter about this, honest I'm not, but it does often seem that people who know you very well end up buying really lousy gifts. What I really want to find out is this: why do they do that? It turns out, market researchers want to know, too. How can they have a prayer of selling people things they don't want when people can't even convince their loved ones to buy them things they do want?
Davy Lerouge and Luk Warlop have designed a clever study to examine this very issue. They wanted to know whether couples who've been together for at least six months were any better at predicting each…
dmunger | December 13, 2006Keith Payne's work on racial stereotyping brings up an intriguing possibility. During the weapons identification task, viewers are more likely to erroneously identify a harmless object as a weapon if it was preceded by a black face compared to a white face. They are also more accurate identifying weapons after seeing black faces compared with white faces.
It's possible that both of these results are due to the same underlying mental process, but Payne's research also invites another possible assessment: that separate processes are responsible for the two different behaviors. One behavior:…
dmunger | December 7, 2006Very few of us can avoid stereotyping others. When we're actively trying to avoid racial stereotyping, we often end up looking ridiculous. But the very fact that we can try to avoid it suggests that there's something more to racial stereotypes than a "stereotype center" in the brain. If stereotyping was completely automatic, we'd be no more able to resist stereotypes than we are able to stop seeing.
So if we can try to resist stereotyping, why doesn't resisting always work? The article I just linked points to a study showing that people -- even police officers -- are more likely to mistakenly…
dmunger | November 30, 2006The recent controversial shooting of an unarmed black man in New York has generated terrible grief and perhaps justifiable anger. But if officers honestly believed the man was armed and intended to harm them, weren't they justified in shooting?
Perhaps, but an important additional question is this: were they predisposed to believe he was armed simply because he was black? Consider this quick movie:
It will flash two pictures. One man is armed, the other unarmed. Who do you shoot? I've primed you to think about race, so it's not really a fair test. If you were a police officer who believed…
dmunger | November 14, 2006If a Brahman child from Nepal is asked what she would do if another child spilled a drink on her homework, her response is different from that of a Tamang child from the same country. The Brahman would become angry, but, unlike a child from the U.S., would not tell her friend that she was angry. Tamang children, rather than being angry, would feel ashamed for having placed the homework where it could be damaged -- but like Brahmans, they would not share this emotion with their friends. So how do children who might grow up just a few miles from each other develop such different attitudes?…
dmunger | October 17, 2006Click on the "Video Games / Technology" category over to the left and you'll see that we've covered many, many studies on the subject of video game violence, almost all of them demonstrating a link between playing violent games and real-world aggressive behavior. Nearly every time we do, we receive an influx of comments from gamers claiming that video games don't make them more aggressive. Quite the contrary, they argue, the games help them wind down, releasing pent-up anger harmlessly in a virtual world rather than causing real harm.
Offering counterexamples (such as the fact that games…
dmunger | October 11, 2006Cognitive Daily would not exist without chocolate. Every week, I buy a bag of chocolate covered raisins, and I portion them out precisely each day so that I've finished them by all by (casual) Friday. I try to time my consumption to coincide with the most difficult part of the job: reporting on peer-reviewed journal articles. The little news items, Ask a ScienceBlogger responses, and other miscellaneous announcements can be completed unassisted by chocolate, but then there wouldn't be much reason to visit the site. Sometimes even the chocolate raisins aren't enough, and I head for the nearest…
dmunger | October 3, 2006Tired of all the hoopla about the Blogger SAT Challenge? Do you not want to hear another word about Booker T. Washington and why he is or is not like George W. Bush? Then have I got a study for you: Yolanda Martins and Patricia Pliner have conducted a fascinating experiment about food preferences -- or, rather, what precise attributes make food disgusting.
Though disgust has long been considered to be a "basic emotion," there has been surprisingly little research on what foods evoke disgust (hopefully by now you've figured out that you probably don't want to read this post too close to a meal…
dmunger | September 6, 2006Sometimes we think of emotions as completely separate from the more "objective" parts of the mind. You might believe that emotion can sometimes cloud your judgment, but it certainly can't affect your vision system. Or can it?
Take a look at the following image. It's my attempt to use Photoshop to make a Gabor patch -- a means of testing vision.
Gabor patches are useful because researchers can systematically vary their contrast and determine the limits of the visual system. For example, try this quick movie. The screen will remain blank for a second, then quickly flash four Gabor patches.…
dmunger | August 15, 2006When Jim and Nora talk about the social groups in their school, they matter-of-factly categorize almost every fellow student into stereotyped pigeonholes. There are the nerds, the rockers, the cools, the goths, and of course, the jocks.
The assumption, naturally, is that none of these groups intersect. Jocks are dumb, nerds are smart, and cools could be smart if they cared about grades. But what of this "dumb jock" stereotype? Does it actually pan out in real life?
Herbert Marsh and Sabina Kleitman have conducted an exhaustive study of the records of over 12,000 American students, following…
dmunger | August 1, 2006One of the summer jobs I had during college was working for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research center in Seattle. My job was to do data entry for a breast cancer study; it was simultaneously one of the most boring and depressing jobs I ever had. I sorted through the medical records of hundreds of women, found their chemotherapy dosage regimens, then entered their dosages for weeks and weeks of therapy. For accuracy, I had to enter all the data twice. Even as I was entering the data, I could notice a pattern: the women who completed their entire chemotherapy regimens lived, and those who did…
dmunger | July 25, 2006We've written a lot on Cognitive Daily about the relationship between violent video game play and real-world aggressive behavior. While we feel the evidence showing that playing violent games does cause real aggression is compelling, a frequent critique of our analysis is that other activities, such as competitive sports, may also lead to violence. "Should we ban football?" the commenters opine. We've replied that football is a separate issue which doesn't negate the video game evidence. (For the record, we don't think we should ban violent video games, and the incidence of head injuries and…