Social Cognition

‘Playful Teasing’ in Apes Could Provide Clues to the Evolutionary Roots of Early Humor

Anthropologist Erica Cartmill explores jokelike behaviors in our evolutionary cousins.

Science

Thinking About Other People’s Minds Affects How Children Respond To Unfairness

How the capacity to think about other people’s minds — their thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge — affects children’s reactions to two forms of inequality: inequality that benefits others and inequality that benefits themselves.

Character & Context, Society for Personality and Social Psychology

Religious Experience and Homo Duplex

Where does religious experience come from? In a new article, Connor Wood combines Durkheim’s concept of Homo Duplex, Victor Turner’s concept of antistructure, and a healthy dose of contemporary social cognitive science to offer a new approach to this question.

Science on Religion

MIT Researchers Found a Way to Deter People From Sharing COVID-19 Conspiracies

A new study suggests that periodically prompting users to think about news accuracy could help limit the sharing of misinformation.

Fast Company

Curbing Implicit Bias: What Works and What Doesn’t

Psychologists have yet to find a way to diminish hidden prejudice, but they do have strategies for thwarting discrimination.

Knowable Magazine

The Science of Staying Connected

With millions confined by the pandemic, social neuroscience shows how we can achieve real communication using virtual tools.

The Wall Street Journal

Meet the Psychologist Exploring Unconscious Bias — and Its Tragic Consequences for Society

Jennifer Eberhardt’s experiments reveal impact of implicit racial bias, from classroom discipline to police shootings.

Science

Altruistic Behaviour Plays an Important Role in Human Cognitive Development

Sharing food by infants might be a building block to altruistic giving, a behavior unique to humans.

Nature Research

Social Experience Predicts Infant Altruism, and Points to a Science of Cultural Learning

Rodolfo Barragan and Andrew Meltzoff discuss their findings about human infant behavior.

Nature Research

Gorillas Have Developed Humanlike Social Structure, Controversial Study Suggests

Finding challenges when complex hierarchies arose in great apes.

Science

The Surprising Benefits of Talking to Strangers

Research suggests we may often underestimate the positive impact of connecting with others for both our own and others’ wellbeing.

BBC

How to Have Productive Disagreements About Politics and Religion

Research suggests people intuitively draw a distinction between what is known and what is believed. Recognizing the difference can help in ideological disagreements.

The Conversation

People Like You More Than You Know

The common concern that new people may not like us, or that they may not enjoy our company, is largely unfounded.

Illusion Chasers, Scientific American

Toddlers Like Winners, But How They Win Matters

Unlike other primates, human toddlers watching a competition don’t appreciate victors who shove rivals out of the way. Even little kids prefer high-status characters who aren’t bullies.

All Things Considered, NPR

The Mind Is a Difference-Seeking Machine

Mahzarin Banaji is the co-author of Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People and co-founder of Project Implicit, an organization aimed at educating the public on implicit bias.

On Being

Underestimating the Power of Gratitude

Recipients of thank-you letters are more touched than we expect.

British Psychological Society Research Digest

There’s Only One Way to Truly Understand Another Person’s Mind

When we imagine the inner lives of others, we don’t necessarily gain real insight into other people’s minds.

Quartz

Neuroscience and the Roots of Human Connections

Humans work together on enormous scales to build complex tools as large as cities and create social networks that span the globe. What is the key to our success?

World Science Festival

Beware Emotional Robots: Giving Feelings to Artificial Beings Could Backfire, Study Suggests

What happens when the appearance of an artificial intelligence remains the same but its emotions become more humanlike?

Science

The Disturbing Thing Scientists Learned When They Bribed Babies With Graham Crackers

The general results suggest that people are willing to pay personal costs — up to a point — to avoid dealing with immoral or deviant people, the researchers say, and that this behavior begins very young.

Wonkblog, The Washington Post