Empowering cartoonists, deterring killers, protecting bystanders: Can psychology contribute?

Empowering cartoonists, deterring killers, protecting bystanders: Can psychology contribute?

We respond on many levels, like our readers, to the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo staff in France. The human tragedy makes us sad and angry. The moral atrocity screams for outraged condemnation. The sense of threat calls out community determination, courage, and sacrifice. The counter-mobilisation of millions, and of world leaders, evokes pride and grim satisfaction. / more

Solid science: How graduate students foster research transparency

Solid science: How graduate students foster research transparency

Reproducibility is seen as the gold standard for solid science. However, three are few incentive to work transparently, and even less incentives to conduct replication studies. To change this, more and more teachers are assigning replication studies to graduate students as a class assignment. Will this turn early career researchers into witch hunters? / more

Becoming superhuman: Is it all in your mind?

Becoming superhuman: Is it all in your mind?

Everyone loves a good comic book hero, but what if superhuman feats were something you could learn to do in real life? In this post, we will share some recent scientific evidence that suggests that through mindfulness, people can learn to control their minds, bodies, pain tolerance and emotions in ways that seem almost superhuman. / more

Who gives a Tweet? Fandom, social identity, and why people take to Twitter

Who gives a Tweet? Fandom, social identity, and why people take to Twitter

When we think of the world in terms of categories and different groups of people, we think of the various groups to which we belong and our identities within such groups. The groups to which we belong impact how we perceive ourselves, how others perceive us, and the extent to which we express our social identities in order to bolster our self-esteem . This blog will examine how and why people are motivated to express their social identities using social media and, more specifically, will propose that Twitter serves an important identity function for group members. / more

Is social psychology ready for the big science revolution?

Is social psychology ready for the big science revolution?

In this blog post, I will describe perhaps the greatest challenge facing social psychology (and other social sciences) in the coming decades: The curation and increased accessibility of research findings. I describe several big science efforts that lead to an eventual goal – a search engine of research findings capable of producing instant empirical summaries and translating findings using lay terms. / more

Hot or cold morality? (Part 1)

Hot or cold morality? (Part 1)

How do we make moral judgments? Are people cold, calculating Vulcans? Or are they affectively hot hedonists? Researchers often present morality as a war between vying ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ processes, but in this two-part blog post I argue that the distinction is a false choice. Morality is both hot and cold, but not in the way previous research leads people to believe. / more

Sorry, the relationship with your mother still matters for your achievement in life

Sorry, the relationship with your mother still matters for your achievement in life

Play dates or homework? Piano lessons or TV? Mothers generally want the best for their children. However, what is ‘the best’? Happiness or academic achievement? And, how should parents go about raising their children in the ‘best’ way possible? One answer to this question is to be a ‘tiger parent’. This rather harsh ‘Chinese’ parenting style has been advocated to guarantee successful children. In this post, I will discuss if this means that all mothers should become a bit more ferocious when it comes to parenting. / more

Never give up: The persistence of misinformation effects

Never give up: The persistence of misinformation effects

Politicians, corporations, journalists and even scientists sometimes do it – they tell people things that later on turn out to be incorrect. Yet, getting rid of this so-called misinformation is often easier said than done as false beliefs are particularly sticky. In this blog, I zoom in on the current state of the art in misinformation research. / more

Does discrimination fit a prototype?

Does discrimination fit a prototype?

In this blog post, I discuss what information people use to decide whether a behavior constitutes discrimination . Similar to the way people organize categories and identify objects, I review research showing that people rely on prototypes when deciding what is and is not discrimination . / more

The missing heritability problem

The missing heritability problem

In my last post I described the transition from candidate gene studies to genome -wide association studies, and argued that the corresponding change in the methods used, focusing on the whole genome rather than on a handful of genes of presumed biological relevance, has transformed our understanding of the genetic basis of complex traits. In this post I discuss the reasons why, despite this success, we still have not accounted for all the genetic influences we expect to find. / more