… Building on work done to measure the effectiveness of Air Force officers during the Cold War, psychologists have largely settled on five traits that collectively paint a comprehensive picture of individual personalities. One key dimension of the so-called Big Five is dubbed “openness to experience.” Those who exhibit this […] Read more »
Improving Public Engagement With Climate Change
Despite being one of the most important societal challenges of the 21st century, public engagement with climate change currently remains low in the United States. Mounting evidence from across the behavioral sciences has found that most people regard climate change as a nonurgent and psychologically distant risk—spatially, temporally, and socially—which […] Read more »
The Price of Denialism
… When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do […] Read more »
Unequal, Yet Happy
… Despite soaring inequality, worsened by the Great Recession, and recent grumbling about the 1 percent, Americans remain fairly happy. All of the wage gains since the downturn ended in 2009 have essentially gone to the top 1 percent, yet the proportion of Americans who say they are “thriving” has […] Read more »
Broad Distaste for Health Law, but Little Appetite to Repeal It, Poll Finds
Despite strong dislike of President Obama’s handling of health care, a majority of people in three Southern states – Kentucky, Louisiana and North Carolina – would rather that Congress improve his signature health care law than repeal and replace it, according to a New York Times Upshot/Kaiser Family Foundation poll. […] Read more »
When Numbers Mislead
… Averages are useful because many traits, behaviors and outcomes are distributed in a bell-shaped curve, with most results clustered around the middle and a much smaller group of outliers at the high and low ends. … But averages can be misleading when a distribution is heavily skewed at one […] Read more »