recent research

This month via Kevin Lewis:

• Speeding up thought leaves you with riskier choices. While speeding up events makes us overrate their negative risks.
• Be careful which article you read first in the morning news; it'll shape what you remember in the articles that follow.
• Why our hypotheses seem so much more likely to be true than others.
• Everyone wants the underdog to win.
• Tip for sanitation departments: people are less likely to litter when they smell a clean scent.
• We're more likely to think something is true if its evidence comes in a row, rather than scattered.
• More evidence that clannishness and xenophobia is a left-over evolutionary tactic to avoid disease.
• When trying to debunk a myth, it's best not to do so too forcefully.
• Critically reporting the news - rather than giving a "he said/she said" telling - makes viewers more confident in their own understanding, but also more cynical.
• Social psychologists already know we have a way of liking things we already have - but there's also evidence we like things more if we think we're going to have them. It's also not just things we prefer when they're our own - but ideas.
• Prospect theory - which says we're more / less risk averse depending on how risks are framed - might have reverse results when you add a social context.
• Happy faces mess with our probabilistic judgment. But a happy mood may do the reverse.
• We process information faster - when it fits into the same, coherent picture.
• A study on the effectiveness of good behavior campaigns.
• Another study suggesting bigotry is a left-over strategy to avoid disease - this time comparing country and states with different levels of "parasite-stress."
• Trust and honesty could be casualties of economic inequality - as evidenced by google searches. Or just poverty.
• Just thinking of shopping can make us unhappy. (Study is also cool in showing how it doesn't take much to nudge people to behave more self vs. group-interested.)
• New theory on why depression hasn't been evolved out of the human genome: it protects us against pathogens.
• We are more defined by the experiences we buy than the things we buy.
• One explanation for Kansas: we shape our political views on our hopes for our future financial selves.
• Political psychology talks a lot about values, those deep preferences that help form our identity: but "sacred" values take values to a whole new level of intensity.
• Design matters: how suburban design affects civic participation.
• How big is your social network? Just measure your orbital prefrontal cortex.
• Participating in online communities makes us more financially risk-seeking - apparently because we're feeling that social safety net.
• Memory is necessary for cooperation in groups - but only in limited doses.
• Guilt feels awful for the individual - but it's good for the group.
• When one vote can shift voters' perception of your ideology.
• How can we get lawmakers to be more bipartisan and practical? Pay less attention.
• Education makes us more opinionated and ideological - but intelligence moves us toward the center.
• The blogosphere is shifting political discourse - but differently so for the left and right.
• Contrary to popular belief, we rarely vote in our self-interest - but college kids with tuition loans may be an exception.
• Direct democracy (ballot initiatives, etc.) is supposed to be a politically equalizing force - but that's not the way it pans out, at least for minorities in California. It might just be a way to keep the status quo.
• More evidence that political participation is addictive.
• People are more likely to vote if it's easier to do so.
• Imagining yourself in some-one else's shoes does indeed make us a little more empathetic.