Menu
Psychology
Boost: Improving Mindfulness, Thinking, and Diversity
June 8, 2018
Many important decisions can be difficult; require focused, cognitive attention; produce delayed, noisy feedback; benefit from careful and clear thinking; and quite often trigger anxiety, stress, and other strong, negative emotions. Much empirical, experimental, and field research finds that we often make decisions leading to outcomes we judge as suboptimal. These studies have contributed to the popularity of the idea of nudging people to achieve better outcomes by changing how choices and information...
June 8, 2018
Many important decisions can be difficult; require focused, cognitive attention; produce delayed, noisy feedback; benefit from careful and clear thinking; and quite often trigger anxiety, stress, and other strong, negative emotions. Much empirical, experimental, and field research finds that we often make decisions leading to outcomes we judge as suboptimal. These studies have contributed to the popularity of the idea of nudging people to achieve better outcomes by changing how choices and information...
Malleable Lies: Communication and Cooperation in a High Stakes TV Game Show
June 7, 2018
We investigate the credibility of non-binding pre-play statements about cooperative behavior, using data from a high-stakes TV game show in which contestants play a variant on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. We depart from the conventional binary approach of classifying statements as promises or not, and propose a more fine-grained two-by-two typology inspired by the idea that lying aversion leads defectors to prefer statements that are malleable to ex-post interpretation as truths. Our empirical...
June 7, 2018
We investigate the credibility of non-binding pre-play statements about cooperative behavior, using data from a high-stakes TV game show in which contestants play a variant on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. We depart from the conventional binary approach of classifying statements as promises or not, and propose a more fine-grained two-by-two typology inspired by the idea that lying aversion leads defectors to prefer statements that are malleable to ex-post interpretation as truths. Our empirical...
Jury Pool Underrepresentation in the Modern Era: Evidence from Federal Courts
May 24, 2018
Despite a constitutional mandate that jury pools in the United States be representative of their communities, almost no datasets...
May 24, 2018
Despite a constitutional mandate that jury pools in the United States be representative of their communities, almost no datasets...
Law Students Benefit From ‘Brain Training,’ Study Finds
May 19, 2018
Here is another article on Texas tech's "brain training" program: Law Com, Law Students Benefit From 'Brain Training,' Study Finds. (or here) "Texas Tech law students were better able to synthesize cases and apply legal concepts broadly after undergoing 'brain training' during orientation." "Texas Tech launched the pilot in the fall of 2015 in partnership with the Dallas-based Center for Brain Health. During orientation, the new students learned about basic neuroscience concepts and the role...
May 19, 2018
Here is another article on Texas tech's "brain training" program: Law Com, Law Students Benefit From 'Brain Training,' Study Finds. (or here) "Texas Tech law students were better able to synthesize cases and apply legal concepts broadly after undergoing 'brain training' during orientation." "Texas Tech launched the pilot in the fall of 2015 in partnership with the Dallas-based Center for Brain Health. During orientation, the new students learned about basic neuroscience concepts and the role...
This Is What Psychopaths Want At Any Cost
April 29, 2018
The psychopathic brain is wired to go after rewards, whatever the cost, a neuroscience study finds. The brains of psychopaths release four times as much dopamine in response to rewards as normal people. Imagine how much more pleasure they get from taking whatever they want.
April 29, 2018
The psychopathic brain is wired to go after rewards, whatever the cost, a neuroscience study finds. The brains of psychopaths release four times as much dopamine in response to rewards as normal people. Imagine how much more pleasure they get from taking whatever they want.
Keet, Heavin, & Sparrow on the Psychological Cost of Civil Litigation
April 25, 2018
Michaela Keet, Heather D. Heavin and Shawna Sparrow (University of Saskatchewan College of Law, University of Saskatchewan...
April 25, 2018
Michaela Keet, Heather D. Heavin and Shawna Sparrow (University of Saskatchewan College of Law, University of Saskatchewan...
Dirty Tricks in Mediation
April 24, 2018
For a person dealing with conflict and training people in principled WIN-WIN negotiation, it is always very frustrating to meet with dirty tricks in negotiation. Those inherently adversarial unethical (and/or not broadly accepted as ethical) negotiation ploys misuse some of the cognitive biases in favour of the active party to the detriment of the opposing party. The most common commonly known dirty trick would be walkouts but there are some more sophisticated ones as calling higher authority and bad...
April 24, 2018
For a person dealing with conflict and training people in principled WIN-WIN negotiation, it is always very frustrating to meet with dirty tricks in negotiation. Those inherently adversarial unethical (and/or not broadly accepted as ethical) negotiation ploys misuse some of the cognitive biases in favour of the active party to the detriment of the opposing party. The most common commonly known dirty trick would be walkouts but there are some more sophisticated ones as calling higher authority and bad...
Apologies & Remedial Mismatches
April 22, 2018
While the context is admittedly horrific--victims of sexual abuse and the Catholic Church--data from the Netherlands, which in 2011 implemented a victim-friendly procedure for victims of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church, provide truly unique insights into "whether and how nonmonetary needs can be addressed within the context of tort law and compensation funds, as the decisions include information on why victims initiated the procedure and what types of relief (e.g., an apology, recognition of their...
April 22, 2018
While the context is admittedly horrific--victims of sexual abuse and the Catholic Church--data from the Netherlands, which in 2011 implemented a victim-friendly procedure for victims of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church, provide truly unique insights into "whether and how nonmonetary needs can be addressed within the context of tort law and compensation funds, as the decisions include information on why victims initiated the procedure and what types of relief (e.g., an apology, recognition of their...
Separate the People from the Problem – or the Person from the Action. Strategy or Compassion? In Theory and in Practice
April 19, 2018
In some mediations, I ask myself why people so resolutely retain their anger, their bitterness, or their hurt for such long periods of time. Often mediation takes place only after a conflict has escalated and hardened and been going on for a while, in some cases many years. If feelings of anger and bitterness persist over years, I can’t help but feeling that this is a sad way to spend your life. And often, it is the people who have felt this way for a long time who do not leave mediation much changed,...
April 19, 2018
In some mediations, I ask myself why people so resolutely retain their anger, their bitterness, or their hurt for such long periods of time. Often mediation takes place only after a conflict has escalated and hardened and been going on for a while, in some cases many years. If feelings of anger and bitterness persist over years, I can’t help but feeling that this is a sad way to spend your life. And often, it is the people who have felt this way for a long time who do not leave mediation much changed,...
We’re Teaching Grit the Wrong Way
April 15, 2018
This is an article worth reading in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern...
April 15, 2018
This is an article worth reading in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by David DeSteno, a professor of psychology at Northeastern...
