Psychology

Take any religion that claims to be about peace and it will have a violent history. And while Islam is the most violent religion claiming to be peaceful today, Christians commit plenty of hateful acts - and Buddhists have extremists in their ranks as well. Extremists against religion are exploiting tragedies like the Paris and California terrorist attacks for their own ends, arguing that faith-based beliefs that consider themselves the right way are going to motivate aggressive behavior due to group loyalty and devaluing non-believers. But that is too simplistic, argues a new paper in…

It may not be sexism that keeps more women from top jobs, it may be less understanding of the role of social capital in reaching the top, according to graduate student Natasha Abajian of City University London at the British Psychological Society's Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference in Nottingham. The conclusion came after interviews with 12 women employed as a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or Managing Director (MD) in the communications industry, to explore their perceptions of social capital and how much they believed it was instrumental in helping their careers.…

Claims that sitting is bad for your health were all the rage last year - epidemiological curve matching claimed that you were in real peril if you didn't get up once an hour, while waitresses without epidemiologists surveying them disagreed that a desk job was more harmful. It may be that emails get all of the mainstream media Scare Journalism in 2016. A new presentatin at the British Psychological Society's Division of Occupational Psychology annual conference in Nottingham by Dr Richard MacKinnon from the Future Work Centre suggests that it's not just the volume of emails that causes stress…

No one wants to knowingly buy products made with child labor or that harm the environment and that may be why few people want to know if their favorite products were made ethically. Even beyond that, people really don't like those good people who make the effort to seek out ethically made goods - because, like going on a cleanse, no one ever did so quietly. But there is a downside to busybodies telling us how to live our lives beyond being annoying; itundermines our commitment to pro-social values, says a marketing paper. 'Willful ignorance' is not new, nor is it limited to consumer…

Recent race-related events in Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago and New York City make it seem like race is a big problem in America, but in reality America seems that way because of transparency. We never need to run ad campaigns to stop racist chants at sporting events, which remain a big problem in Europe, and South America and Asia are so racist there isn't much reason to talk about it - Japan is not going to take any refugees from Syria or anywhere else. The reason stories about racial problems in America feel fake is the same reason no one outside social psychology thinks the Implicit…

A recent analysis spanning 40 years of surveys including more than 100 papers on the 'question-behavior effect,' a phenomenon in which asking people about performing a certain behavior influences whether they do it in the future, offers insight to marketers, policy makers and others seeking to impact human behavior. The authors conclude that asking about performing a future behavior changes the likelihood of that behavior happening. That means parents asking their children, 'Will you drink and drive?' should be more effective than saying, 'Don't drink and drive.' For people making New…

Few events encapsulate our infatuation with a well-told story as much as Christmas. As a culture, we are dependent on stories as a tool with which to negotiate our daily lives and make sense of the world around us. In particular, we love magical ones because they allow us to temporarily suspend our disbelief and revel in the joys of doing so. This is something that the best brands manage to channel by tapping into our desires, memories and aspirations. All humans are ultimately bound by the same core emotions – whether it’s our wants, anxieties or fears. Brands aim to encapsulate these so…

With holiday shopping season in full swing, everyone's looking for the perfect gift.  But will it make you happy, or just retailers? Maybe both. A paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science says money can buy happiness, for people who like to shop. In a self-reported survey of happiness, material purchases, from sweaters to skateboards, provide more frequent happiness over time, whereas things like a trip to the zoo (experiential purchases) only provide happiness on individual occasions. The majority of previous surveys examining material and experiential purchases…

It has been long-established that mental health and behavioral problems such as alcohol and drug abuse are risk factors that push teens to smoke. A new study finds that less destructive kids will opt for e-cigarettes instead of cancer-causing cigarettes. That's a win for the future of public health, where smoking is linked to numerous maladies.  In recent years, smoking has declined in middle and high school students, but the use of electronic cigarettes in this group tripled from 2013 to 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The hope is that they are…

When it comes to trust in their physicians, minority groups in the United States are less likely than white people to believe their doctors care about them, according to research by University of Pennsylvania's Abigail Sewell. "That's one of the biggest takeaways of this work," said Sewell, a Vice Provost Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Penn's Population Studies Center in the School of Arts&Sciences. "African-Americans and Latinos are more likely to think this," though the latter group, she showed, has even deeper mistrust of physicians, likely because one or both Latino parents…