by Melinda Wenner from Scientific American " Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing—it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social...

Daniel M. Hausman and Brynn Welch One of the hottest ideas in current policy debates is “libertarian paternalism,” the design of policies that push individuals toward better choices without limiting their liberty. In their recent book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and then Obama advisor (now head of the White...

by Igor Grossmann, Jinkyung Na, Michael E. W. Varnum, Denise C. Park, Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett It is well documented that aging is associated with cognitive declines in many domains. Yet it is a common lay belief that some aspects of thinking improve into old age. Speci fi cally, older...

The focus on complexity as a problem of the financial meltdown of 2008–2009 suggests that crisis is in part epistemological: we now know enough about financial and economic systems to be threatened by their complexity, but not enough to relieve our fears and anxieties about them. What marks the current...

In this chapter we examine how effective leadership varies across national and cultural boundaries. Specifically, we ask what elements of leadership are core and more universal across these boundaries? The foundation of our approach is the notion that organizations and societies have implicit leadership...

Shannon Spaulding Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of...

Susannah B. F. Paletz , Christian D. Schunn The psychology of science typically lacks integration between cognitive and social variables. We present a new framework of team innovation in multidisciplinary science and engineering groups that ties factors from both literatures together. We focus on the...

Miriam Matthews , Shana Levin , Jim Sidanius Using data from a longitudinal study of college students, this study assessed the relationships among the threat perceptions of realistic threat and intergroup anxiety, the ideological motives of system justification and social dominance orientation (SDO)...

Chang-Jiang Liu, Shu Li Research on the construction of self and of others has indicated that the way that individuals construe themselves and others exerts an important influence on their cognition, emotion, and even behavior. The present study extends this line of research to mixed-motive situations...

Ryan T. McKay, Daniel C. Dennett From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this...

Igor Ryabov The academic achievement of immigrant children has been a focus of social research for decades. Yet little attention has been paid to peer social capital and its importance as a school context factor for the academic success of immigrant youths. Using multilevel data from the National Longitudinal...