By Emma Young
Countless studies have investigated how a leader’s behaviour influences their followers. There’s been very little work, though, on the reverse: how followers might influence their leaders. Now a new paper, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, helps to plug that gap with an alarming finding: good, morally upstanding followers can create less ethical leaders.
Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web
If you want to get on a cat’s good side, it’s worth mastering the art of the “slow blink”. Cats “smile” by blinking slowly, and now researchers have found that they respond positively to humans who do the same. Participants who performed a slow blink were more likely to receive one from their cat, reports Sara Rigby at BBC Science Focus. Cats were also more likely to approach an experimenter who had just slow-blinked.
Continue reading “Body Language And Spooky Science: The Week’s Best Psychology Links”
For its many flaws, it’s hard to deny that technology has improved our ability to communicate with one another. We now have a huge range of options when it comes to speaking to our friends and family, whether we’re texting, IMing, or sending them emails.
With such a smorgasbord of choices available to us, it can be easy to forget the humble phone call. And according to new work published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, a reticence to pick up the phone might also be robbing us of stronger connections with those we love.
Continue reading “Phone Calls Help Create Closer Bonds Than Texting”
We often like to think of ourselves as impartial decision-makers — but of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Our day-to-day thoughts and behaviours are biased in all kinds of ways. But is the same true for people in the legal profession, which prides itself on its supposed objectivity and fairness?
According to a new study in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, judges and lawyers may be immune to at least some of the biases that affect the rest of us. In particular, their judgements seem less prone to the biasing effects of emotive language.
By Emma Young
As an English-speaker, I might “see red” with anger, go “green” with envy or, on a bad day, “feel blue”. To me, it seems natural to associate certain colours with particular emotions — but is the same true for people around the world? And if so, do we all make the same emotion/colour matchings? These questions have been investigated in a new study, published in Psychological Science, which has produced some fascinating results.
No matter how happy you are in yourself, there’s probably something about your personality you’d like to change. Maybe you feel you’re too uptight or want to be more outgoing, or perhaps you’d like to be less moody or more tolerant of other people’s shortcomings.
It’s likely that such a change in personality will have some kind of social consequence, whether that’s in your relationship with your spouse or your ability to get on with your colleagues. But it might also affect which moral values you hold important.
That’s what Ivar R. Hannikainen and colleagues suggest in a new paper in the Journal of Research in Personality. They found that growth in one area, empathy, was associated with a shift in moral foundations to a more classically “liberal” style of morality.
Continue reading “People Who Want To Be More Empathic May Also Develop “Liberal” Moral Values”
Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web
Displaying empathy towards others seems like an obvious virtue — but it can have a dark side, writes Richard Fisher at BBC Future. Empathising with a single, identifiable individual can divert time and money away from causes that could benefit many more people, for instance. And bad actors can harness our tendency to empathise with those who are similar to us in order to get us to act aggressively towards the out-group.
Continue reading “Conspiracy Theories And Winter Wellbeing: The Week’s Best Psychology Links”
By Emma Young
Edith Piaf famously regretted nothing. But regret is an important emotion, because it can lead us to avoid repeating mistakes, or to heal damaged relationships. It’s also an emotion that many of us feel on a regular basis. “Regret is ubiquitous and powerful,” write Teresa McCormack at Queen’s University Belfast and colleagues in a new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science. “It is one of the most frequently mentioned emotions in conversation and affects a huge variety of everyday choices.”
Though there’s been plenty of work on regret in adults, much less is known about how it develops in children. In this new review, McCormack and her colleagues consider what we do know about its development, and outline the major gaps still left to fill. There are implications not just for the basic understanding of regret but also for informing educators in nurseries and schools. After all, even young children are expected to feel bad about harming others — but, depending on their age, there are limits to just what they can feel in such a scenario.
Continue reading “Here’s How The Experience Of Regret Develops Through Childhood”
As I write this post, I’m struggling a little to put words onto the page. I didn’t sleep well last night, and my tiredness has taken its toll on my ability to concentrate. But at least I’m sat at my desk at home and not, say, in control of a massive hunk of metal filled with fuel and electronics, hurtling through space at thousands of kilometres an hour. Because a new study in Scientific Reports has found that astronauts need to get enough sleep too — and when they don’t, their performance suffers.
Continue reading “Astronauts Need A Decent Night’s Sleep Too”
By Emma Young
How can you discourage kids from copying each other on tests? You could always use a simple frame to separate them, or even a ruler to draw an imaginary line between their desks. When these behavioural “nudge” techniques were used in new research published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, they significantly reduced cheating among 5 to 6-year-olds. This shows “that even seemingly unremarkable features of children’s environments can nudge them to act honestly,” write the researchers, led by Li Zhao at Hangzhou Normal University in China.
Continue reading “Even Imaginary Barriers Can Prevent Kids From Cheating On Tests”
