Cognition, Decision making

Higher Intelligence And An Analytical Thinking Style Offer No Protection Against “The Illusory Truth Effect” – Our Tendency To Believe Repeated Claims Are True

GettyImages-952609456.jpgBy Matthew Warren

It’s a trick that politicians have long exploited: repeat a false statement often enough, and people will start believing that it’s true. Psychologists have named this phenomenon the “illusory truth effect”, and it seems to come from the fact that we find it easier to process information that we’ve encountered many times before. This creates a sense of fluency which we then (mis)interpret as a signal that the content is true.  

Of course, you might like to believe that your particular way of thinking makes you immune to this trick. But according to a pre-print uploaded recently to PsyArXiv, you’d be wrong. In a series of experiments, Jonas De keersmaecker at Ghent University and his collaborators found that individual differences in cognition had no bearing on the strength of the illusory truth effect. 

Continue reading “Higher Intelligence And An Analytical Thinking Style Offer No Protection Against “The Illusory Truth Effect” – Our Tendency To Believe Repeated Claims Are True” →

Brain, Mental health, Psychosis

A Key Brain Difference Between Voice-Hearing Patients And Voice-Hearing Healthy Controls Challenges The “Continuum Model”
Screenshot 2019-06-24 at 12.07.36.png
Via Garrison et al, 2019

By Christian Jarrett

Hearing voices that don’t exist in the outside world is the most common form of hallucination experienced by people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or related conditions and it can be very distressing. However, there is a growing recognition that hearing voices is not always pathological. Many mentally well people hear voices (or “auditory verbal hallucinations”) – in fact, around 6-7 per cent of adults in the general population report having had such experiences at some point in their lives.

This has led some experts to propose a “continuum model” in which the same fundamental underlying mechanism leads to hearing voices in healthy people and in patients with a clinical diagnosis, but that for various reasons, such as a traumatic past, the experience is more troublesome and distressing for the patients. However, a new open-access paper in Schizophrenia Bulletin challenges the continuum model, finding an important brain difference between patients who hear voices and voice-hearing healthy controls.

Continue reading “A Key Brain Difference Between Voice-Hearing Patients And Voice-Hearing Healthy Controls Challenges The “Continuum Model”” →

Health, Personality

Decades-Long Surveys Suggest The “Deleterious Effects of Smoking May Extend to Detrimental Personality Changes”

GettyImages-157197321.jpgBy Christian Jarrett

There is increasing recognition that while our personality traits are stable enough to shape our lives profoundly, they are also partly malleable, so that our choices and experiences can feedback and influence the kind of people we become. A new study in the Journal of Research in Personality shines a light on a highly consequential behaviour that captures this dynamic – smoking cigarettes.

The results add “… to existing knowledge on the implications of smoking by showing that this behaviour is also likely to alter individuals’ characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving over time,” the researchers said.

Continue reading “Decades-Long Surveys Suggest The “Deleterious Effects of Smoking May Extend to Detrimental Personality Changes”” →

Educational

A Core Subgroup of Believers Don’t Just Think Learning Styles Are Real, But Also Inherited And Hard-Wired In The Brain
GettyImages-638711984.jpg
Teachers were just as likely to be “essentialist” believers in learning styles as other participants

By Matthew Warren

The “learning style” myth – the idea that we each have a preferred modality for learning, usually described as visual, auditory or kinaesthetic – just won’t die. Belief in learning styles endures even though psychologists have pointed out repeatedly the many problems with the concept. Students don’t benefit from learning in their supposedly preferred style, for example, and teachers and their pupils don’t agree on the pupil’s learning style in the first place. 

But exactly how believers in learning styles conceive of the concept has until now remained unclear. It could be that people take an “essentialist” view that our learning style is something we are born with, for instance. On the other hand, they may believe that learning styles are more liable to change – a “non-essentialist” perspective. A new study in the Journal of Educational Psychology has found that, in fact, both views are common, a result that could have implications for tackling the myth. 

Continue reading “A Core Subgroup of Believers Don’t Just Think Learning Styles Are Real, But Also Inherited And Hard-Wired In The Brain” →

Creativity, Developmental, Educational

Thinking About Their Multiple Identities Boosts Children’s Creativity And Problem-Solving Skills

GettyImages-478513620.jpgBy Christian Jarrett

It usually helps to “get a fresh pair of eyes” on a problem, especially from someone with a different perspective than your own. But what if you could find a variety of vantage points from within yourself? After all, each of us has multiple roles and identities in life. In a new paper in Developmental Science, a team led by Sarah Gaither at Duke University presents evidence that prompting children to think about their own multiple identities boosts their problem-solving skills and increases their flexible thinking.

“Someone can be a woman and White, a teacher and a parent, a girl and a friend,” the researchers write. “Although individuals may not automatically reflect on their multiple identities, here we propose that when they do, it may have positive consequences for their creative problem solving and flexible thinking.”

Continue reading “Thinking About Their Multiple Identities Boosts Children’s Creativity And Problem-Solving Skills” →

Mental health

Preliminary Evidence That Lonely People Lose The Reflex To Mimic Other People’s Smiles, Potentially Sustaining Their Isolation

GettyImages-586707418.jpgBy Emma Young

Loneliness is a “disease”, associated with an increased risk of death equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Strides have been made in understanding what form of loneliness is damaging (a lack of close relationships with other people, rather than a lack of relationships per se), but ways to tackle loneliness are badly needed. Now a new study, available as a preprint on PsyArXiv, reveals a way in which loneliness seems to be maintained and, therefore, a potential route to an intervention. 

Continue reading “Preliminary Evidence That Lonely People Lose The Reflex To Mimic Other People’s Smiles, Potentially Sustaining Their Isolation” →

Media

Psychologists Show It’s Possible To Fix Misleading Press Releases – Without Harming Their News Value
Screenshot 2019-06-17 at 09.37.46.png
Corrected press releases led to more accurate news, without any dip in quantity of coverage; via Adams et al, 2019

By Jesse Singal

There are many reasons why media outlets report scientifically misleading information. But one key site at which this sort of misunderstanding takes root is in the press releases that universities issue when one of their researchers has published something that has a chance of garnering some attention. A new open-access study in BMC Medicine attempts to change this by intervening in the process directly.

Continue reading “Psychologists Show It’s Possible To Fix Misleading Press Releases – Without Harming Their News Value” →

Cognition, Educational, Reading

Most Comprehensive Review To Date Finds The Average Person’s Reading Speed Is Slower Than Previously Thought

giphyBy Matthew Warren

You should take just under two-and-a-half minutes to finish reading this blog post. That’s going by the findings of a new review, which has looked at almost 200 studies of reading rates published over the past century to come up with an overall estimate for how quickly we read. And it turns out that that rate is considerably slower than commonly thought.

Of the various estimates of average reading speed bandied around over the years, one of the most commonly cited is 300 words per minute (wpm). However, a number of findings of slower reading rates challenge that statistic, notes Marc Brysbaert from Ghent University in Belgium in his new paper released as a preprint on PsyArxiv. 

Continue reading “Most Comprehensive Review To Date Finds The Average Person’s Reading Speed Is Slower Than Previously Thought” →

Brain, Technology

Breakthrough Investigation Of People With A Sixth Finger Has Implications For Infant Medicine And Cyborgs
Screenshot 2019-06-12 at 11.55.25.png
The anatomy of the right hand of one of the polydactyl volunteers, via Mehring et al, 2019

By Christian Jarrett

Picture in your mind a futuristic, technologically enhanced human. Perhaps you imagined them with a subcutaneous device in their arm for phone calls and browsing the internet. Maybe they are wearing smart glasses for augmented reality. What I’d wager you didn’t think of is the presence of an artificial sixth digit attached to each hand. However, a breakthrough open-access study in Nature Communications – the first to study the physiology and sensorimotor mechanics of polydactyly volunteers (people born with extra fingers) – shows the feasibility and practical advantages that would be gained from such an extra appendage. The results also have implications for the medical treatment of polydactyl people, who often have their extra finger removed at birth on the presumption that it will be of no benefit to them.

Continue reading “Breakthrough Investigation Of People With A Sixth Finger Has Implications For Infant Medicine And Cyborgs” →

evolutionary psych, Social

Testing An Evo Psych Theory Outside Of The Lab: Prestige And Dominance-Based Social Hierarchies Emerge Even Amongst Cornish Choirs And Chess Clubs

GettyImages-176917918.jpgBy Matthew Warren

Psychologists have noticed that aspiring leaders generally pursue one of two different approaches for getting to the top of the social food-chain. Some people exert influence by building up skills or knowledge that command respect and deference from their peers – known as the prestige strategy. Others prefer to rule by fear instead, forcing others to fall into line – the dominance strategy. This dichotomy has even been suggested to account for the vastly different leadership styles of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. 

But many of the studies that have looked at the dynamics of prestige and dominance have done so in artificial social situations, examining groups of strangers brought together for a short time in the lab. So in a new study published open-access in Royal Society Open Science, Charlotte Brand and Alex Mesoudi went out into the world and looked at how hierarchies based on prestige and dominance affected the behaviour of real social groups. 

Continue reading “Testing An Evo Psych Theory Outside Of The Lab: Prestige And Dominance-Based Social Hierarchies Emerge Even Amongst Cornish Choirs And Chess Clubs” →