Category Archives: Psychology

Journalism, Psychology

Racism after race

IN a famous series of experiments conducted in the 1970s, social psychologist Henri Tajfel asked how little it would take to persuade one group of people to discriminate against another. The answer was almost nothing. Having assigned boys to two groups based largely on random criteria, he asked them to play a game. Each boy had to decide how many pennies to give to members of his own group and to members of the other group. Tajfel found that the boys were more generous toward their own group, even though the groups had been defined almost arbitrarily. Thus was born the concept of the “minimal group…”

This article first appeared in ScienceNews on 14 May 2017. To continue reading, click here.

Forensic, Journalism, Psychology

Identity crisis

 

WHAT is the essence of you? What is it about you that makes you, well, you? These are no mere academic questions for armchair philosophers, but practical ones with real consequences.

Take a police artist sketching a suspect from an eyewitness description, or a profiler writing up the behavioural idiosyncrasies of a particular “perp”. These representations become tools in criminal investigations that often lead to arrests. If they fail to capture the essence of the person being sought, the wrong person may be arrested…

This article first appeared in New Scientist on 8 April 2017. To continue reading, click here (paywall).

History of science or medicine, Journalism, Medicine, Neuroscience, Pale Rider, Psychology

How crowds affect your health

GLASTONBURY 1997, the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the pilgrimage to Lourdes in 2008: what do they have in common? All three were the backdrop to outbreaks of communicable disease, and so of interest to doctors working in mass gathering medicine. The goal of this relatively young field is to address the specific health problems associated with mass events, but two British psychologists now claim that this can only be done effectively by understanding the psychological transformation that people undergo when they join a crowd…

This article first appeared in the BPS Research Digest on 4 January 2017. To continue reading, click here:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/01/04/joining-a-crowd-transforms-us-psychologically-with-serious-health-implications/

Journalism, Neuroscience, Psychology

Mapping the uncanny valley

ns_logoON THE face of it, The Polar Express was a sure-fire winner: starring Tom Hanks, it told the charming story of a boy’s magical train journey to the North Pole. But when the movie came out in 2004, there was a problem: the ultra-realistic animation gave some viewers the creeps. Five years later, when James Cameron chose the same technology for Avatar, his graphics people reportedly thought the decision might bankrupt the production company. But Cameron’s blue humanoids went down a storm. For a while, Avatar was the highest-grossing film of all time…

This article first appeared in New Scientist on 29 October 2016. To continue reading, click here (paywall).