As we reach the end of 2010, the Psychology Today editors asked me (and a few
other bloggers) to think about the ten most important papers of the year. I have
decided to focus on ten significant advances in the science of psychology rather
than individual papers, but spirit is the same.
Top 10 lists can be fun, because they give you a chance to look back over the
research that has been done and to highlight trend. Over the course of the year,
I wrote about a lot of research that was published in this year, and some of
that has ended up on this list. However, the blog format requires not only that
a paper be good, but also that it have a hook. That is, there has to be
something about the research that people can connect with immediately. Not every
advance has obvious relevance to your daily life right now, though some of this
research may have important implications in the future. So, a top 10 list gives
me a chance to highlight some of those advances as well.
Here are ten advances in the field from 2010. The order of these is arbitrary
and isn't meant as a ranking.
Your beliefs about psychological abilities matter. Carol Dweck and her
colleagues have been working for many years to show that that you can think
about most psychological abilities as talents that are inborn and unchangeable
or as skills that can be acquired and changed over the course of the year. In
studies published in 2010, research found that if you believe that your
abilities are skills, you are better able to exercise willpower, to learn to
trust people who have hurt you in the past, and to confront prejudice.
Advertising affects your choices without your awareness. Melanie Dempsey and
Andrew Mitchell published a scary paper in the Journal of Consumer Research
demonstrating that being exposed to a brand along with other positive items
creates positive feelings about the brand. Later, you choose that brand, even if
it is objectively worse than others that you could have chosen.
The use of Bayesian Statistics. In a December article in The New Yorker, Jonah
Lehrer pointed out that some phenomena in the psychology literature are not
always repeatable. One reason for this failure to replicate results comes from
the kinds of statistics often used in Psychology. We use a procedure called Null
Hypothesis Testing that was developed over 100 years ago. More recently,
statisticians and psychologists have been working to create a new form of
statistical testing based on Bayesian statistics. These methods may help us to
avoid publishing studies that are not likely to replicate. John Kruschke
published a nice tutorial on how to use these methods.
Distance matters. Over the past several years, Nira Liberman and Yaacov Trope
have been demonstrating that people think of things more abstractly when they
are distant from you in space or time. In 2010, researchers demonstrated that
this difference in abstractness affects a variety of aspects of thinking
including your beliefs about whether something is true, your beliefs about
political candidates, your likelihood of changing your attitudes, and your
ability to negotiate successfully.
The brain tells us a lot when you're doing nothing. Cognitive neuroscience has
been using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging for two decades to help us to
understand what the brain is doing when you are thinking. A lot of early work
focused on identifying particular brain areas that are involved in particular
tasks. New research has looked at what the brain is doing when you are resting.
The areas of the brain that are active together when you are not focusing on
anything in particular provide important insights into the ways that areas of
the brain are connected together. This technique of studying resting state
activity became more prominent in 2010.
Video games. 2010 was a big year for research on the positive and negative
effects of video games on behavior. On the positive side, video games with
socially positive messages can increase helping behavior. Video games may also
make you faster at doing visual processing. On the negative side, violent video
games promote aggression. People who believe that video games are a release from
stress may be particularly vulnerable to playing violent video games, which may
actually increase their aggression. In addition, kids who live in houses with
video game systems tend to do worse in school than those who do not have video
game systems.
Exposure to Culture. As the world gets smaller, people have more opportunities
to interact with members of other cultures. Lynn Imai and Michele Gelfand
demonstrated that having skill at interacting with people from other cultures
improves your ability to negotiate. In addition, William Maddux, Hajo Adam and
Adam Galinsky found that living in another culture and adapting to the norms of
that culture can make you more creative.
Performance and Stress. Events like the pilot who landed a plane safely in 2009
as well as shooters on college and high school campuses make it clear that we
need to know more about how ordinary people perform under stress. A lot of great
research on this topic was summarized in Sian Beilock's book Choke.
Money and happiness. We spend a lot of our lives working to make more money,
because we believe that having money will bring us happiness. A paper by Travis
Carter and Tom Gilovich suggests that money will make you happier if you buy
things that give you experiences like vacations and enrichment classes rather
than stuff like cars and jewelry. In addition, Chrisopher Boyce, Gordon Brown,
and Simon Moore found that we tend to compare the amount of money we make to
what the people around us make. We are happiest when we earn more than other
people in our own social group.
Categories matter. When you categorize things, you generally assume that the
members of that category have some inner essence. Saying that someone votes
Republication feels different than saying that are a Republican, because when
you categorize them, you are communicating that they have inner qualities that
make them a member of that category. Andrei Cimpian, Amanda Brandone, and Susan
Gelman found that when we hear generic statements about categories like "Robins
are red," we believe that almost all members of that category have the property,
even though we don't need that much evidence to be willing to use a statement
like that. This work has important implications for stereotypes.
And Finally...Limericks. Every list of advances should also list one step back
that the field has taken. This year's step back comes from the University of
Texas Limerick Committee, which was featured in the December, 2010 issue of the
APS Observer.
I hope you learned a lot in 2010. Here's to a great year of Psychological
Science in 2011.
