Category: Media

Media, Mental health, Terrorism March 8, 2019

A New Study Has Investigated Who Watched The ISIS Beheading Videos, Why, And What Effect It Had On Them

In the summer of 2014, two videos were released that shocked the world. They showed the beheadings, by ISIS, of two American journalists – first, James Foley and then Steven Sotloff. Though the videos were widely discussed on TV, print and online news, most outlets did not show the full footage. However, it was not difficult to find links to the videos online. At the time, Sarah Redmond at the University of California, Irvine and her colleagues were already a year into a longitudinal study to assess psychological responses to the Boston Marathon Bombing, which happened in April 2013. They realised that they could use the same nationally representative sample of US adults to investigate what kind of person chooses to watch an ISIS beheading – and why. Their findings now appear in a paper published in American Psychologist.

Continue reading “A New Study Has Investigated Who Watched The ISIS Beheading Videos, Why, And What Effect It Had On Them” →

Developmental, Forensic, Media, Technology March 6, 2019

These Violent Delights Don’t Have Violent Ends: Study Finds No link Between Violent Video Games And Teen Aggression

By Matthew Warren

Claims that violent video games lead to aggression have been around since the days of Space Invaders. When young people are exposed to violent media, the theory goes, their aggressive thoughts become more prominent, leading them to commit acts of violence. But while several studies have found results that seem to back up this idea, the evidence is far from unequivocal.

Now a study published in Royal Society Open Science has failed to find any association between the time spent playing violent video games and aggressive behaviour, adding to a growing body of literature that suggests that such a link has been overstated – or may not exist at all.

Continue reading “These Violent Delights Don’t Have Violent Ends: Study Finds No link Between Violent Video Games And Teen Aggression” →

guest blogger, Media, Morality, Technology November 9, 2018November 21, 2018

Psychologists claim outrage is getting a bad rap

By guest blogger Jesse Singal

Outrage: It’s absolutely everywhere. Today’s world, particularly the version of it blasted into our brains by social media, offers endless fodder, from big, simmering outrages (climate change and many powerful institutions’ refusal to do anything about it) to smaller quotidian ones (every day, someone, somewhere does something offensive that comes to Twitter’s attention, leading to a gleeful pile-on).

In part because of rising awareness of the adverse consequences of unfettered digital-age outrage, and of journalistic treatments like So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson (which I interviewed him about here), outrage has become a particularly potent dirty word in recent years. Outrage, the thinking goes, is an overly emotional response to a confusing world, and drives people to nasty excesses, from simple online shaming to death threats or actual violence.

But a new paper argues that the concept of outrage has gotten too bad a rap and that its upsides, especially as a motivator of collective action and costly helping, have been overlooked. Writing in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the psychologists Victoria Spring, Daryl Cameron and Mina Cikara detail important questions about outrage that have yet to be answered, and they highlight how certain findings – especially from the “intergroup relations” literature, in contrast to the mostly negative findings from moral psychology – suggest it can serve a useful purpose.

Continue reading “Psychologists claim outrage is getting a bad rap” →

evolutionary psych, guest blogger, Laughter, Media October 11, 2018October 15, 2018

There’s a fascinating psychological story behind why your favourite film baddies all have a truly evil laugh

By guest blogger David Robson

Towards the end of the Disney film Aladdin, our hero’s love rival, the evil Jafar, discovers Aladdin’s secret identity and steals his magic lamp. Jafar’s wish to become the world’s most powerful sorcerer is soon granted and he then uses his powers to banish Aladdin to the ends of the Earth.

What follows next is a lingering, close-up of Jafar’s body. He leans forward, fists clenched, with an almost constipated look on his face. He then explodes in uncontrollable cackles that echo across the landscape. For many millennials growing up in the 1990s, it is an archetypical evil laugh.

Such overt displays of delight at others’ misfortune are found universally in kids’ films, and many adult thriller and horror films too. Just think of the rapturous guffaws of the alien in the first Predator film as it is about to self-detonate, taking Arnold Schwarzenegger with it. Or Jack Nicholson’s chilling snicker in The Shining. Or Wario’s manic crowing whenever Mario was defeated.

A recent essay by Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen in the Journal of Popular Culture asks what the psychology behind this might be. Kjeldgaard-Christiansen is well placed to provide an answer having previously used evolutionary psychology to explain the behaviours of heroes and villains in fiction more generally.

Continue reading “There’s a fascinating psychological story behind why your favourite film baddies all have a truly evil laugh” →

Intelligence, Media, Political December 11, 2017January 2, 2018

Fake news leaves a lasting impression on the less smart

By Alex Fradera

One reason why fake news is dangerous is that we don’t like giving up reassuring certainties, and once we have a take on things, it colours further information – hence the seeming bulletproof nature of conspiracy theories and partisan political hatreds. But new research in Intelligence suggests this is truer for some people than others. For mentally sharp people, the results suggest it’s relatively easy to jettison an outdated perspective, while for those of lower cognitive ability, the dregs remain.

Continue reading “Fake news leaves a lasting impression on the less smart” →

Educational, Media November 27, 2017November 27, 2017

Accessible science reporting can foster overconfidence in readers

After reading an accessible science news story, participants were more likely to feel they had no need to consult an expert to find out more

By Alex Fradera

A scientifically informed public is a wonderful thing, and at the Digest we’re happy to be part of cultivating it. But we’d be the first to admit that many scientific issues are too complex for a single article to resolve decisively. When it comes to making consequential life decisions, it’s still important to defer to experts who can draw nuanced conclusions from looking at the big picture. But experts are increasingly denigrated, and a new study in the journal Public Understanding of Science suggests that one cause may be our easy access to information, giving us the impression that we already know all we need. Specifically, science reporting that is accessible, breezy and details-light can discourage readers from consulting experts on that topic.

Continue reading “Accessible science reporting can foster overconfidence in readers” →

Anger, Media, Technology July 18, 2017August 2, 2017

Hard-core players of violent video games do not have emotionally blunted brains

By Christian Jarrett

No sooner had the American Psychological Association released their 2015 task force report supposedly confirming that violent video games make players aggressive than the criticisms of the report started pouring in, of bias and bad practice. On the issue of whether violent games breed real-world aggression, there’s not much that you can say for certain except that there’s a lot of disagreement among experts. So of course, one more study is not going to settle this long-running debate.

But what a new paper in Brain Imaging and Behaviour does do is provide a good test of a key argument made by the “violent games cause aggression” camp, namely that over time, excessive violent gameplay desensitises the emotional responsiveness of players. Using brain scanning to look for emotional desensitisation at a neural level, Gregor Szycik at Hannover Medical School and his colleagues in fact found no evidence that excessive players of violent video games are emotionally blunted.

Continue reading “Hard-core players of violent video games do not have emotionally blunted brains” →

Media April 21, 2017

How much are readers misled by headlines that imply correlational findings are causal?

By Alex Fradera

What do you take from this hypothetical headline: “Reading the Research Digest blog is associated with higher intelligence”? How about this one: “Reading this blog might increase your intelligence”? According to science writing guides like HealthNewsReview.org, taking the first correlational finding from a peer-reviewed article and reporting it for the public using the second wording, implying causation, is a sin of exaggeration, making a relationship appear more causal than the evidence suggests.

Yet this happens a lot. A 2014 British Medical Journal (BMJ) article showed these exaggerations to be rife in media coverage of correlational studies, with 81 per cent of news articles committing the sin. Dismayingly, one third of press releases were also guilty. These normally involve editorial input from professionals and often the scientists themselves, who should really know better. Reading about this, we might conclude that science communicators of all stripes need to get more familiar with the best practice of describing causality.

However, the authors of that BMJ analysis started to ponder whether readers interpret these headlines literally, or whether they draw their own conclusions. Now their research group has tested this for a paper in Journal of Experimental Psychology, and their findings suggest that while science writers need to pick up their game, science-writing guides also have some catching up to do.

Continue reading “How much are readers misled by headlines that imply correlational findings are causal?” →