Think back to your Psychology 101 class in college or an upper level Social Psychology undergraduate course and you will probably remember the famous case of Kitty Genovese who was murdered in a brutal attack outside her Queens, NY apartment in 1964. According to psychology textbooks, at least 38 onlookers witnessed the attack (mostly through hearing her screams) and yet no one came to her aid or called the police. Psychologists labeled this “seeing but not helping” phenomenon as “the bystander effect”. Essentially, they say, the presence of others observing someone who needs help, diminishes the likelihood that any individual

On July 10, 2017, we published the first part of this post on combatting mistrust in science. As we continued to read, we decided there was more for you to know about this topic so here’s a bit more information. We wanted to share a couple of ways scientists shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to maintaining credibility. First, they think themselves more rational than the rest of us and second, their over-the-top advocacy for science backfires by making them seem like “just another partisan group”. In research speak, this is an example of scientists being only human,

You’ve likely seen a lot about the high level of mistrust of science in the past few years. Not everyone believes there actually is a science mistrust issue (see this post from Dan Kahan at Cultural Cognition blog) but for a non-problem it certainly gets a lot of coverage! First, here’s a bit of review of a small sampling of the recent “nobody trusts science” literature. Pew Research published a report in 2015 on which areas science has increasing difficulty being seen as credible. While Pew is objectively reporting survey data, many of the “science mistrust” stories are written by

Just this week I saw the Gallup survey on trust in the US government to protect citizens against terrorism and knew immediately we needed to blog about the survey here. While I’ve seen people say that politicians will go to war for more favorable showings on polls, in focus groups, or in the ballot box—I never really understood how it could be used well until the last two seasons of House of Cards, a [fictional] Netflix show. Here’s just one way fear was manipulated on House of Cards. And now, the proof that this is not just made for TV

Here’s another post combining the things we’ve been collecting to blog about and presented together so we can clear the desk off with newer stuff! “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” At least, this is the best known quotation of the 19th century British politician Lord Acton. But in 2017, we have an article courtesy of The Atlantic that tells us power does more than corrupt, it actually damages your brain’s abilities that helped you rise to power in the first place. It’s called the “power paradox”: once you have power, you lose some of the skills

We’ve written about eyewitnesses and problems with accuracy here often. Today we have an article that tells us 242 people were wrongly identified by eyewitness testimony and served years in prison prior to being exonerated by DNA testing. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University wondered how memory in people might be altered by police use of “individual mugshots, an array of mugshots, composite sketches, and lineups” as well as subtle innuendos. Specifically, they wanted to answer this question: Does presenting a picture along with a question like ‘is this the person who did it?’ create an association between those two things

Recently, several articles have come out on Millennials and women but neither were enough to fill an entire post—so we’re combining them into a single post so that we do not miss passing on the information. “Psychologically scarred” Millennials are “killing industries” This article is almost funny but they are blaming Boomers (the parents of the Millennials) for the “industry-killing” habits of the Millennials. They quote Millennials who say this is “just some more millennial-blaming BS” and apparently, headlines saying Millennials have “killed off” another corporation or even industries are very common. The buying habits of Millennials are very different

This is a combination post of some of the ways race is coming up in 2017 (so far). It is easy to become numbed to how many shocking things are said on a regular basis now, but we agree with John Oliver in this NSFW video—this is not normal and we need to remember that! So today, here’s just a sampling of things that we need to pay attention to and not just accept as “normal”. These are not normal things. What is even more disturbing is these are stories all published within the past week. A lawyer who stood up

Time for another one of those posts that combine the things we’ve been reading into a ‘this and that’ sort of post that gives you information on issues you may want to know more about and that certainly make you a more interesting conversationalist. Or perhaps a more memorable conversationalist. Employers are less likely to hire women wearing headscarves It seems like it has been forever since anyone suggested we were living in a post-racial society but it probably has been more than 150 days. (Sigh.) We’ve written before about women who wear head scarves but in the context of

Last year, we posted several times on CRISPR (the revolutionary gene-editing tool) as an example of how to explain something very complex to the novice juror. We’ve also talked a lot about how expert witnesses are not present in the courtroom to show jurors and parties how smart they are—but rather, to educate the jurors. When we say we want expert witnesses to teach at the high school level—we often get confusion from experts as to  how this can possibly be done. Typically, the expertise of an expert technical witness is in a specific area and it is hard to