Psychology

If I asked you to call 1,000 people today and screen each person for 1 minute in the hopes that 500 of them would agree to participate in an upcoming survey, you could not do it. If you spent 60 seconds making 1,000 calls it would take over 16 hours, without a break. Strictly speaking, doing a poll is not easy. It requires many steps, each very important to the outcome. One major issue is locating sample subjects. How do you find these people? Today, a truly random representative sample for a poll would require one to either knock on doors, send out snail mail, or send out emails, text…

Some people get flustered with the New York Times because they print a story about a political candidate that is blatantly fabricated. Others say it is not the newspaper it used to be. Some people think it is the greatest newspaper in the world. As a social psychologist, I got my jolt from the New York Times when I took a look at the recent article titled “Latest Election Polls 2016.” By way of background, I have a Ph.D. in social psychology from the sociology department at Indiana University. I was a pre-doc and a post-doctoral fellow in a NIMH-funded training program in research…

Many people today believe they possess a soul. While conceptions of the soul differ, many would describe it as an “invisible force that appears to animate us”. It’s often believed the soul can survive death and is intimately associated with a person’s memories, passions and values. Some argue the soul has no mass, takes no space and is localized nowhere. But as a neuroscientist and psychologist, I have no use for the soul. On the contrary, all functions attributable to this kind of soul can be explained by the workings of the brain. Psychology is the study of behavior. To carry out their work…

Here is one more reason American taxpayers should not continue to spend over $100 million a year on complementary, alternative and integrative techniques; after a six-day Ayurvedic-based well-being program that featured a vegetarian diet, meditation, yoga and massages they determined that their program led to measurable decreases in a set of blood-based metabolites associated with inflammation, cardiovascular disease risk and cholesterol regulation.  Six days. Fortunately for them, there is always an open access journal that will publish a paper if the credit card clears, in this case…

Zen cooking according to the teachings of the master-less monk Feng Sa Sha (风洒沙, Wind Sprinkling Sand) is, unsurprising perhaps when considering the radical fundamentality of Zen, not only the most inexpensive and easy as well as perhaps most importantly, great tasting of all cooking, but moreover it is the most healthy and wholesome diet – no surprise that it is consistent with and full of good science.   We think that the small expensive things taste good because we finish eating them so fast, and then we want more, and this desire for more of it is henceforth associated. The cheap…

Your choice of smartphone provides valuable information about you, according to a new social psychology paper. That's right, not only is your choice of smart phone indicative of your personality. If you bought a Samsung Galaxy, a survey and personality trait match determined, you have more modesty and are more honest. You are also more of an introvert than an iPhone user. That makes sense. Ads for iPhone users show them dancing all over the place in public, even in business meetings.  This is more crazy talk from the social science field that thinks we evolved to like a certain type of…

Do anti-vaccine people hang around with anti-vaccine people or did hanging around with them cause them to lose faith in science? There are an alarming number of factors that all correlate with anti-vaccine sentiment; the types of food purchased, beliefs about science, beliefs about energy, and beliefs about politics. But did all of those happen, and the people who embraced them gravitated toward each other, or did the social circle create the issue? In Social Psychological and Personality Science, Michael Laakasuo, Anna Rotkirch, Venla Berg, and Markus Jokela write that while it is well known…

Does how much hair a man has matter in how he is perceived? A gigantic cosmetic surgery industry say it's true. What we unclear was how much was objectively true versus how much it was just a confidence-builder. If a man was self-conscious about being bald, he may seem more insecure. With hair, that might go away. Does that make him seem more attractive, though?  A new paper in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery claims they are more attractive - at least on surveys. Lisa E. Ishii, M.D., M.H.S., of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, and coauthors suggests men with…

In the last decade, hurricanes have been essentially inconsequential. Sandy was so mild by the time it hit New York City that Manhattan media had to invent the term "Super Storm" to talk about it, because tropical storm sounded too nice. Yet they may be worse than decades ago, on average. Objective measurements of storm intensity are really only recent but they show that North Atlantic hurricanes have grown more destructive in recent decades.  This makes sense, there are more people and that will mean more people with property damage when they hit. Yet coastal residents' views on the…

Wealthy elites try to portray traditional values as something held by poor people, but a new sociology paper contends it is based on gender, not wealth or education. And that's why women are more likely to shoulder the bulk of housekeeping and childhood duties. This even holds for gay couples, where whichever is more masculine or feminine will do more of those sorts of chores, said Natasha Quadlin, the lead author of the paper and a doctoral student in sociology at Indiana University about the survey of more than 1,000 adults in 2015 which sought to learn which characteristics, including…