Bias

Societies Are Tearing Apart, But They Can Be Brought Together

We must reduce the social distance between people and focus on shared human traits, says Adam Waytz, author of The Power of Human.

Open Future, The Economist

Positive Attitudes About Aging May Pay Off in Better Health

A bias against growing older has physical effects.

Science News

How Much of This Post Will You Read Before Making Up Your Mind About It?

From evaluating artwork, novel foods, or goods and services to evaluating peers, political candidates, and marriage prospects, people use far less information than they think they will before making judgments and decisions.

Character & Context, Society for Personality and Social Psychology

Is the Western Mind Too WEIRD to Study?

Psychologist says research relies on too many participants from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies.

Science

Has Humanity Reached ‘Peak Intelligence’?

Are our IQs set to increase forever, or are we on the cusp of decline? David Robson explores the past, present, and future of intelligence.

BBC Future

Now You See It

Our brains predict the outcomes of our actions, shaping reality into what we expect. That’s why we see what we believe.

Aeon

Finding the Value of Being a ‘Good-ish’ Person

Dolly Chugh is the author of The Person You Mean to Be.

TODAY

Authenticity Under Fire

Researchers are calling into question authenticity as a scientifically viable concept.

Beautiful Minds, Scientific American

In-Group Favoritism Is Difficult to Change, Even When the Social Groups Are Meaningless

One has to go to great lengths to counteract the deeply ingrained tendency to infuse new social groups with rich meaning.

Beautiful Minds, Scientific American

Presenting Science to the Public in a Post-Truth Era

Grappling with the challenge of how, in this time of sweeping science denial, scientists can craft messages about their research that not only inform but also persuade.

UConn Today

Facts Aren’t Enough: The Psychology of False Beliefs

Sometimes, when we believe something, no amount of data can change our minds.

Hidden Brain, NPR

The Case for Empathy

In a world of difference we can — and should — work harder to cultivate subtle, perceptive empathy toward all human beings.

Aeon

The Science of Looking on the Bright Side

How neuroscientist Tali Sharot accidentally stumbled on what’s known as “the optimism bias” — our hard-wired belief that our future will be better than our past or present.

To the Best of Our Knowledge

Brain Scan Evidence in Criminal Sentencing: A Blessing and a Curse

How do jurors use different kinds of information about mental illness when making sentencing decisions? An experiment finds that neurobiological evidence could harm or help defendants.

The Conversation

The “Bias Blind Spot” Just Replicated (“Everyone Else Is More Biased Than Me”)

Prasad Chandrashekar, Siu Kit Yeung, and colleagues report reproducing the original study.

British Psychological Society Research Digest

Here’s How to Crack Your New Year’s Resolutions

Practicing gratitude, compassion, and resilience can help us keep our New Year’s resolutions.

The Guardian

The Kernel of Human (or Rodent) Kindness

What we can learn from lab rats that don’t show empathy for other rats.

The New York Times

How Culture Shapes Your Mind — and Your Mental Illness

Psychologists have spent the last 100 years trying to standardize the diagnosis of mental illness. But what if we all experience it differently?

The Boston Globe

You Can’t Characterize Human Nature If Studies Overlook 85 Percent of People on Earth

Ninety percent of psychology studies come from countries representing less than 15 percent of the world’s population. Researchers are realizing that universalizing those findings might not make sense.

The Conversation

Why We Stereotype Strangers

No matter how open-minded we are, we all have unconscious biases, a social psychologist says. Here’s how to deal with them.

The Wall Street Journal

Scientists Used AI to Explore the Results of the Implicit Association Test

By trying to understand how machines pick up human bias, we might in turn be able to learn how we acquire those biases ourselves.

Quartz