recent research

This week in Kevin Lewis' blog:

• Where does our morality come from? Not Kant.
• How to increase helping behavior online: show a name or a webcam.
• Researchers explain the psychology behind the pot calling the kettle black.
• More evidence that, when it comes to disagreements, what really riles people are a challenge to their values, not their personal interests.
• We also tend to understand that people act on their values.
• Although, if we think folks have different political values, we lose some fundamental visceral feelings of empathy for them. (We likewise lose empathy for those we deem lower status.)
• Then again, that lack of empathy can be partially overcome by "perspective giving" and "perspective taking." Or other "communality-focused" exercises.
• A theory of minority employment discrimination - based not on stereotypes, but on how we calculate the odds of finding top notch candidate.
• A peek into the future: how kids relate to - and partly humanize - interactive robots.
• Want to encourage creativity? Put workers in multicultural pairs. And flash some green (the color, not money) at them.
• Sometimes we like new things, but often we prefer the old an familiar: it may depend on whether we're in growth mode or feeling insecure.