Month: August 2019

Excuse Validation: A Cross‐cultural Study

Abstract If someone unintentionally breaks the rules, do they break the rules? In the abstract, the answer is obviously “yes.” But, surprisingly, when considering specific examples of unintentional, blameless rule‐breaking, approximately half of people judge that no rule was broken. This effect, known as excuse validation, has previously been observed in American adults. Outstanding questions […]

Published on August 12, 2019

It’s not you, it’s the network

The result of the 2016 US presidential election was, for many, a surprise lesson in social perception bias — peoples’ tendency to assume that others think as we do, and to underestimate the size and influence of a minority party. Many psychologists attribute the source of these biases to faulty cognitive processes like ‘wishful thinking’ […]

Published on August 12, 2019

Study finds older adults less distracted by negative information

USC researchers looked at ’emotion-induced blindness,’ which refers to distractions caused by emotionally arousing stimuli. In four experiments using a quickly presented sequence of images, they examined how older adults prioritize emotional information. They found both younger and older adults demonstrated emotion-induced blindness, but older adults were more distracted by positive information and less distracted […]

Published on August 12, 2019