-
Do Animals Suffer Like People?
Imagine walking into a room filled with people crying. They are all wearing black; makeup running; tissues clutched hard in their hands. Instinctively, you too are overcome by the grief that is flowing through the room, knowing the cause of their misery and empathizing with their suffering.
-
Summer newsletter is up!
Check out our latest newsletter (Issue 6) on psychology and the media!
-
‘Tis the Season for Giving!
It’s that time of year again, where malls and websites (and hopefully some local businesses, too!) are overrun with holiday shoppers hoping to score the perfect gift to give a loved one. But why are we so obsessed with finding that perfect present? Recent research by Tristen Inagaki, a fourth year graduate student in the…
-
Is the way to a woman’s heart through her funny bone?
Say what you will about the findings in evolutionary psychology—they certainly have good narratives. One of the latest, published in the July issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, uses sexual selection theory to argue that humor is important to men and women in heterosexual romantic contexts, albeit in different ways.
-
The Power of Glasses: Evidence-Based Charitable Giving, Part 2
In the poor, rural Gansu province in China, 10-15% of young students need glasses but only 2% of those kids actually have glasses. To follow up on my previous post on the science of charitable giving, in this post I’ll briefly describe a recent study which found that simply giving these students glasses significantly increased…
-
Who Should Get Your Charity Money? Scientific Perspectives on Giving
In the past, my partner and I have mostly haphazardly divvied up our good intentions to whichever charities are most easily accessible to us because of advertisements or a person standing in a grocery store parking lot. Lately, we are rethinking that (lack of) strategy. As Yale economists Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel wrote in…
-
Parental Internet Mediation strategies. What works?
A recent study tested how different parental mediating strategies affect children’s disclosure of private information while online (Lwin, Stanaland, & Miyazaki, 2008). Privacy is a critical issue facing not just children, but also adults, but youth may not have the understanding that the Internet allows almost any digital use to leave a permanent footprint. The…
-
Accurate Representations of Science: Whose Responsibility Is It?
Here’s a question that’s been on my mind lately: Whose job is it to make sure that the non-scientist consumers of science get it right? I’ve had a few discussions with various psychologists about this lately and they frequently bring up two answers to this question: (1) It’s the consumer’s job. I heard from a…
-
Race to Nowhere
A documentary called Race To Nowhere is making its way around the schools in my neighborhood. The film was made by a mother who was disturbed by the amount of homework that schools were assigning, as she felt her children were focusing too much on homework and not enough on play. This has been a…
-
Distinguishing Science and Pseudoscience: How to Judge Whether a Treatment is Worthwhile
From the TV, internet, mail-advertisements, and billboards, we are inundated on a daily basis with solicitation for the newest “cure-all” treatment. This problem is not limited to the psychological community, and it is increasingly prevalent in new-age communities that focus on “holistic” or “energy” treatments. Of course these treatments sounds intrinsically appealing, and we all…