recent research

This week's picks from Kevin Lewis' blog:

• Being stressed makes us more likely to feel and act kindly toward our fellow man.
• Getting humans to fear other groups... who wear different color t-shirts.
• Our reaction to being social outcasts depends on whether the in-group has explicitly rejected us or just doesn't realize we exist. But no matter how much we're feeling left out, money can help dull the pain.
• One way to get extremists moderate their views: get them to think in the abstract rather than the concrete.
• Evidence that people actually saw the emperor's new clothes: people's experience of poems improves when they think they're from famous authors.
• Scientific education may enlighten us to how the world actually works, but that doesn't mean we entirely give up our unscientific notions.
• Your mamma was right: those kids could be a bad influence on you.
• Studies have shown that when people are feeling morally good about themselves they are less likely to do moral things. You can even induce that effect by eating organic food.
• When it comes to moral situations, we tend to like the idea of taking moral action but not necessarily following through ourselves.
• We are, by and large, moral consequentialists.
• Laughter comes to the self-aware. (But it may just be the authors were testing self-aware humor.)
• Locke was not alone in his instinct: we all tend to link ownership with those who have worked to earn it.
• Woah. Much of cognitive and social psychology today is based on the premise that brains should do good jobs of approximating statistical reality. These guys suggest that's a bunch of bunk.