Tag: Research

Judith Wallerstein and divorce: how one woman changed the way we think about breakups.

Judy went to the Berkeley library to see what had been written about how children react to divorce. And found nothing.

The remedy was the “California Children of Divorce Study” which Judy and her colleague Joan Berlin Kelly launched in 1971. They recruited 60 families with 131 children between the ages of 3 and 18 at the point the marriage dissolved, when life as everyone knew it began to unravel. The parents were middle class and well educated. The children had been well cared for.

Judy personally interviewed every man, woman, and child at the time of separation (followed by divorce) and, for the vast majority, every five years afterward for the next quarter of a century. The study turned into an unprecedented longitudinal examination of the effects of divorce on the American family.

Judy’s methodology was based on intimate case studies. She talked with each person over many hours, probing for feelings and insights. For years, she held each child “in her head,” remembering every dream they reported, every fantasy, every frustration. Huge files containing these case studies are still stored downstairs at her home on Belvedere Island in Marin.

Judith Wallerstein and divorce: how one woman changed the way we think about breakups.

Stanford Prison Experiment: why famous psychology studies are now being torn apart  – Vox

The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature.

The study took paid participants and assigned them to be “inmates” or “guards” in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after the experiment began, the “guards” began mistreating the “prisoners,” implying evil is brought out by circumstance. The authors, in their conclusions, suggested innocent people, thrown into a situation where they have power over others, will begin to abuse that power. And people who are put into a situation where they are powerless will be driven to submission, even madness.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been included in many, many introductory psychology textbooks and is often cited uncritically. It’s the subject of movies, documentaries, books, television shows, and congressional testimony.

But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit.

Stanford Prison Experiment: why famous psychology studies are now being torn apart  – Vox

A Stanford psychologist on the art of avoiding assholes – Vox

The world is full of assholes. Wherever you live, whatever you do, odds are you’re surrounded by assholes. The question is, what to do about it?

Robert Sutton, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has stepped up to answer this eternal question. He’s the author of a new book, The Asshole Survival Guide, which is basically what it sounds like: a guide for surviving the assholes in your life.

In 2010, Sutton published The No Asshole Rule, which focused on dealing with assholes at an organizational level. In the new book, he offers a blueprint for managing assholes at the interpersonal level. If you’ve got an asshole boss, an asshole friend, or an asshole colleague, this book might be for you.

Asshole survival, Sutton says, is a craft, not a science, meaning one can be good or bad at it. His book is about getting better at it.

I sat down with him recently to talk about his strategies for dealing with assholes, what he means when he says we have to take responsibility for the assholes in our lives, and why he says self-awareness is key to recognizing that the asshole in your life may be you.

“You have to know yourself, be honest about yourself, and rely on people around you to tell you when you’re being an asshole,” he told me. “And when they are kind enough to tell you, listen.”

A Stanford psychologist on the art of avoiding assholes – Vox

The Psychological Research That Helps Explain The Election

At the end of most years, I’m typically asked to write about the best psychology papers of the past twelve months. This year, though, is not your typical year. And so, instead of the usual “best of,” I’ve decided to create a list of classic psychology papers and findings that can explain not just the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. but also the rising polarization and extremism that seem to have permeated the world. To do this, I solicited the opinion of many leading psychologists, asking them to nominate a paper or two, with a brief explanation for their choice. (Then I nominated some stories myself.) And so, as 2016 draws to a close, here’s a partial collection of the insights that psychology can bring to bear on what the year has brought about, arranged in chronological order.

New Yorker

The trick to not giving a terrible gift this year

When you’re buying gifts for people this holiday season, you might be thinking about how your loved ones will react the moment they open them. Will they be truly happy and thankful — or will you see disappointment flicker across their faces?

If you’ve given terrible gifts in the past, this focus on the moment of exchange might be why. A new paper that reviews decades of research on gift-giving suggests one common mistake people make is thinking too much about how recipients will react to their gift initially, rather than how it might benefit them in the long run.

Washington Post

How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.

The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.

“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA Internal Medicine paper.

NYTimes

CASUAL SEX: EVERYONE IS DOING IT

Zhana Vrangalova had hit a problem. On a blustery day in early spring, sitting in a small coffee shop near the campus of New York University, where she is an adjunct professor of psychology, she was unable to load onto her laptop the Web site that we had met to discuss. This was not a technical malfunction on her end; rather, the site had been blocked. Vrangalova, who is thirty-four, with a dynamic face framed by thick-rimmed glasses, has spent the past decade researching human sexuality, and, in particular, the kinds of sexual encounters that occur outside the norms of committed relationships. The Web site she started in 2014, casualsexproject.com, began as a small endeavor fuelled by personal referrals, but has since grown to approximately five thousand visitors a day, most of whom arrive at the site through organic Internet searches or referrals through articles and social media. To date, there have been some twenty-two hundred submissions, about evenly split between genders, each detailing the kinds of habits that, when spelled out, can occasionally alert Internet security filters. The Web site was designed to open up the discussion of one-night stands and other less-than-traditional sexual behaviors. What makes us engage in casual sex? Do we enjoy it? Does it benefit us in any way—or, perhaps, might it harm us? And who, exactly, is “us,” anyway?

New Yorker

The magical thing eating chocolate does to your brain

In the mid 1970s, psychologist Merrill Elias began tracking the cognitive abilities of more than a thousand people in the state of New York. The goal was fairly specific: to observe the relationship between people’s blood pressure and brain performance. And for decades he did just that, eventually expanding the Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS) to observe other cardiovascular risk factors, including diabetes, obesity, and smoking. There was never an inkling that his research would lead to any sort of discovery about chocolate.

And yet, 40 years later, it seems to have done just that.

Washington Post

This cutting-edge research is a huge step in the war against brain disease

If you don’t understand a problem, chances are you won’t be able to solve it.

That’s a major stumbling block for scientists attempting to develop treatments for brain disorders such as autism, depression, dementia, and more that will affect an estimated 100 million Americans at some point in their lives.

TechInside