Credit: halfpoint/Deposit Photos Summer is the time for music festivals like Burning Man, Burning Nest, Firefly, and Bonnaroo. If you are planning to attend one this year, this post might interest you. The science journalism clearinghouse called Study Finds recently reported on a study conducted at Yale University. The journalists' report included the causal headline …
Continue reading Music festivals “make people more generous, socially connected”
Humans who can see nature views from their windows tend to be happier. Photo: © Amla Sanghvi The examples in this post come from an extended piece by journalist Alan Lightman. He writes about how, For more than 99 percent of our history as humans, we lived close to nature. We lived in the open. The …
Continue reading Psychological consequences of a “nearly natureless world”
The study evaluated both victims and defendants in criminal cases. Compared to white victims, the media were much less likely to depict photos of Black victims of crime with family or friends. How might this choice impact people's empathy for Black pain and suffering? Credit: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is a human-rights organization …
Did this Netflix show cause a bump in chess.com membership? FILMCRAFt/WONDERFUL FILMS/NETFLIX/ Album/Alamy Stock Photo Did you watch the Netflix limited series Queen's Gambit, which came out in the fall of 2020? Many people did; it was one of Netflix's most popular series to date. Many folks have speculated that the release of this show …
Continue reading Has Queen’s Gambit affected the popularity of chess?
After matching students based on their pre-college voting behaviors, the researchers found that students who had taken a political science class became more likely to register to vote. Photo credit: Lakshmiprasad/Depositphotos In the online news outlet called The Conversation, researchers write summaries of their own research studies for a general audience. Here's an example from …
Continue reading Taking Poli Sci predicts likelihood of voting
Which type of quasi-experimental design does this study seem to fit best? The dark line on top represents respondents with children. The red line represents all respondents. The lighter blue line at the bottom represents respondents without children. Credit: Courtesy Patrick Cooney and H. Luke Shaefer. From Poverty Solutions, May 2021, University of Michigan, Since …
In one of the studies, researchers found that students whose classrooms were on the train-track side of the school made less progress in reading than those on the quieter side. Credit: Alon Adika/Shutterstock The weekly Freakonomics podcast recently put together an episode about the psychological impact of loud noises in our environment. You can listen …
These students might misattribute their early-morning fatigue to their interest in the subject. Photo credit: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock Podcasts have been gaining in popularity in the last few years, and several feature psychological research. I'm going to be devoting my next few posts to some podcasts. We'll start with this very short, 3-minute episode/ interview from the …
Which government-led social distancing measures are effective at stopping the spread of the novel Coronovirus? One company has contributed data to answering this question. A private health technology company, Kinsa sells a "smart thermometer" which links to an app that guides people through what to do if they have a fever. When people use the …
Here's a photo of a toutouwai (North Island Robin) sporting its bands for identification. Photo: Shutterstock We don't include many animal behavior studies in ERM blog, but here's a great one about animal memory. How long do you think wild animals can remember new skills they have learned? In this report in The Scientist, we …
Continue reading A serendipitous study of long-term memory in birds