A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social and behavioral scientists
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, explains David Dunning, comes when “people who are incompetent or unskilled or not expert in a field lack expertise to recognize that they lack expertise. So they come to conclusions, decisions, opinions that they think are just fine when they’re, well, wrong.”
Batja Mesquita, a social psychologist at Belgium’s University of Leuven where she is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, theorizes that what many would consider universal emotions – say anger or maternal love – are actually products of culture.
Albert Bandura, a renowned social cognitive psychologist most well-known for his Bobo doll experiments studying aggression, died on July 26 at the age of 95.
Our work in recent years has focused on how to prevent people from falling for misinformation in the first place, building on a framework from social psychology known as inoculation theory.
Given the import of its subject matter, SAGE Publishing (the parent of Social Science Space) had agreed to make an e-book o the psychology of COVID-19 freely available.
Rom Harré, a philosopher deeply engaged in critically examining the attributes and vulnerabilities of the social sciences, and who was both an early computational researcher and an incredibly prolific academic author, died October 17 at age 91.
Is singing is a behavior that evolved to bond groups together? This question launched a research project that involved London’s Megachoir and the charity Workers’ Educational Association.
“Writing a textbook,” says Tom Heinzen, “is a foolish idea.” It’s an enormous undertaking and the rewards a few. But there are some rewards, and Heinzen and Wind Goodfriend, the authors of the new intro textbook ‘Social Psychology,’ are reaping one of them: their book received a Most Promising New Textbook Award from the Textbook & Academic Authors Association, or TAA.
“The brain is an association-seeking machine,” Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It puts things together that repeatedly get paired in our experience. Implicit bias is just another word for capturing what those are when they concern social groups.
Everyone is supposed to cheer for good guys. We’re supposed to honor heroes, saints and anyone who helps others, and we should only punish the bad guys. But is the expression ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ really accurate? New research shows we often do, in fact, punish those who do good deeds.
When online charitable appeals take off, social psychologist Sander van der Linden perks up. He studies ‘viral altruism,’ and in this Social Science Bites podcast he details to host David Edmonds how he studies this phenomenon.
Social psychologist Alex Haslam talks about many of his research interests, from Donald Trump to identity politics to classic studies – is his ‘glass cliff work’ with Michelle Ryan count? – in a wide-ranging interview following his receiving the President’s Award from the British Psychological Society.
