Psychological Science

Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny

apmcgraw — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:10:36 -0800

Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We
integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as
benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative
norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance

Psychological Science

Do Babies Learn From Baby Media?

jd8d — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 06:34:59 -0700

In recent years, parents in the United States and worldwide have purchased enormous numbers of videos and DVDs designed
and marketed for infants, many assuming that their children would benefit from watching them. We examined how many new
words 12- to 18-month-old children learned from viewing a popular DVD several times a week for 4 weeks at home. The
most important result was that children who viewed the DVD did not learn any more words from their monthlong exposure

Psychological Science

How Magic Changes Our Expectations About Autism

GustavKuhn — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 07:52:26 -0700

In the vanishing-ball illusion, the magician’s social cues misdirect the audience’s expectations and attention so that the audience “sees” a ball vanish in the air. Because individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are less sensitive to social cues and have superior perception for nonsocial details compared with typically developing individuals, we predicted that they would be less susceptible to the illusion. Surprisingly, the opposite result was found, as individuals with ASD were more susceptible to the illusion than a comparison group.

How Magic Changes Our Expectations About Autism

Why Women Apologize more than Men: Gender Differences in Thresholds for Perceiving Offensive Behavior

kschuman — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 12:08:25 -0700

Despite wide acceptance of the stereotype that women apologize more readily than men, there is little systematic evidence to
support this stereotype or its supposed bases (e.g., men’s fragile egos). We designed two studies to examine whether gender
differences in apology behavior exist and, if so, why. In Study 1, participants reported in daily diaries all offenses they committed
or experienced and whether an apology had been offered. Women reported offering more apologies than men, but they also

Psychological Science

In Blind Pursuit of Racial Equality?

kpauker — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:06:54 -0700

Despite receiving little empirical assessment, the color-blind approach to managing diversity has become a leading institutional
strategy for promoting racial equality, across domains and scales of practice. We gauged the utility of color blindness as a means
to eliminating future racial inequity—its central objective—by assessing its impact on a sample of elementary-school students.
Results demonstrated that students exposed to a color-blind mind-set, as opposed to a value-diversity mind-set, were actually