It’s hiring season in U.S. academia which means that departments are planning their searches and candidates are prepping their materials. Last year, we (the authors) ran a cluster hire designed to increase our department’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our goal in this post is to provide one example of how to organize such […]
For the next two weeks, we are running a digital event called “#WeNeedEDI: Striving for equality, diversity, and inclusion throughout academics’ careers.” The event focuses on the experiences of underrepresented academics and potential ways to increase equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) as we go from early-career academics to emeriti. The Psychonomic Society “recognizes the strategic […]
Doctor’s visit, shot, Band-Aid, and a lollipop. It’s a familiar scene from many a childhood vaccination. But what if inoculations could prevent more than just disease? Stephan Lewandowsky and Mushin Yesilada (pictured below) investigated just that in a recent experiment published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, a Psychonomic Society journal. In a large online […]
Rhyming verses may make you think of Shakespearean sonnets or old-fashioned love poems. Yet, rhymes are ubiquitous in modern life. We remember how to spell words by repeating “i before e, except after c,” and the number of days in the months through “Thirty days hath September …,” Attorneys admonish jurors that “if it doesn’t […]
In October 2008, ‘Year2183’ posted a message on the anti-Muslim website ‘Gates of Vienna’, arguing that Muslims should be forcibly deported from Norway. Three years later, on 22 July 2011, the same individual posted and e-mailed a 1500-page document describing his extreme-right ideology and the extensive preparations that he made before killing 77 people in […]
Humans aren’t perfect – and neither are our brains. When solving problems, we often make mistakes or estimate an answer that’s good enough, but not exact. Typical methods to understanding cognition ignore these errors or treat them as random noise. But, in a recent article published in the Psychonomic Society journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, researchers propose […]
Psychologists have been fascinated with the effects of competition on performance for a long time. Way back in 1898, Triplett found that bike racers were faster when racing against each other versus against the clock and similar research continues to this day. A recent summary suggests that competition can be both beneficial and harmful, depending […]
Imagine how you might measure someone’s spatial thinking skills – their ability to understand, manipulate, and reason about how objects interact in physical spaces. If you’re a psychologist, you probably immediately thought of Shepard and Metzler’s mental rotation task. In this task, participants are shown two illustrations and asked if the pictured objects are identical or […]
As human beings, we are often moved to action based on moral messages. Adding a single moral-emotional word to a tweet (hate, greed, fight, safe, shame, etc.) increases the number of retweets by approximately 20% and moral content captures our attention. However, as researchers, deciding whether a particular newspaper article or social media post has a moral message […]
Compound words are funny creatures. They exist as words themselves, but also contain smaller words which have their own unique meanings. For example, the compound word butterfly refers to the pretty insect with wings, but it also contains the smaller words butter (yellow spread made from cream) and fly (move through the air). But how […]