ACME in the News
09.27.09 John Bargh and Josh Ackerman Interviewed by The Boston Globe
Thinking literally: The surprising ways that metaphors shape your world
Drawing on philosophy and linguistics, cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us. Click here to go to the article.
“The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought,” says John Bargh, a psychology professor at Yale and leading researcher in this realm.
A few psychologists have begun to ponder applications. Ackerman, for example, is looking at the impact of perceptions of hardness on our sense of difficulty. The study is ongoing, but he says he is finding that something as simple as sitting on a hard chair makes people think of a task as harder. If those results hold up, he suggests, it might make sense for future treaty negotiators to take a closer look at everything from the desks to the upholstery of the places where they meet. Read more...
08.24.09 John Bargh Interviewed by Seed Magazine
Honesty is an Automatic Process (For Some)
Using fMRI to examine the brain's activity during lying and telling the truth, researchers Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxon recently found that honesty is an automatic process—but only for some people. Click here to go to the article.
Their findings—that honesty is automatic for some people—is part of a growing body of work that shows that many, if not most, of our daily actions are not under our conscious control. According to John Bargh, a Yale social psychologist who studies automaticity, even our higher mental processes are performed unconsciously in response to environmental cues.
“It could potentially be some of the most intriguing evidence for group selection,” Bargh speculates, adding that the results are reminiscent of the evolutionary idea that “cheaters” and “suckers” coexist in a specific ratio in the animal kingdom. Read More...
07.19.09 Research by Harris, Bargh, and Brownell featured in The New York Times
Snack Ads Spur Children to Eat More
A new study finds that seeing food ads on television can induce people to eat more snacks while watching. Click here to go to the article.
In one experiment, conducted by researchers from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, 118 children, ages 7 to 11, were each given bowls of Goldfish crackers and then left to watch a 14-minute cartoon. During the commercial breaks, some of the children saw ads for games and entertainment; others watched four spots for unhealthy snacks like waffle sticks with syrup, fruit roll-ups and potato chips. The children who saw the food spots ate 45 percent more Goldfish than those who watched the game commercials.
According to the authors, the experiment suggests “a direct causal link between food advertising and greater snack consumption.” Read More...
06.16.09 John Bargh interviewed by Edge
"We discovered a new vein of research — the relation between physical and social or psychological concepts — that we came to by taking evolutionary principles seriously and applying them to psychology. We weren't using evolutionary psychology, which has largely been focused on mating and reproduction. Our focus, rather, was in terms of evolutionary biology and the basic principles of natural selection: and that field makes clear that humans must have had these kinds of mechanisms or these processes to guide our behavior prior to evolution or emergence of consciousness."
Click here to see the video and read the transcript.
04.15.09 Research by Ackerman and Bargh Featured in TIME
Recession Psychology: We Will Spend Again
Forgoing things you want to buy is tough. Watching others do it only makes it tougher. Eventually, a new study suggests, your self-control will give way to your credit card. Click here to go to the article.
The recession has demanded great self-control from many Americans--Even those who haven't lost everything are spending less. A new study published in the journal Psychological Science sheds more light on this phenomenon by showing how we respond when we watch others exercise self-control, as so many of us are watching fellow Americans cut back in the recession.
The authors of the study — psychologists Joshua Ackerman and John Bargh of Yale and social psychologists Noah Goldstein and Jenessa Shapiro of the University of California, Los Angeles — wondered whether people's self-control might be drained vicariously, just by imagining others having to resist temptations. Read More...
10.23.08 Research by Williams and Bargh featured in The New York Times
Heart-Warming News on Hot Coffee
In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people's judgments of and behavior toward a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee. Click here to go to article.
At long last, we have scientific guidance regarding that great question of social lubrication: Should you ask someone to meet for a drink or a cup of coffee? We may also have cause to update Ogden Nash’s famously short poem, “Reflections on Ice-Breaking” — and there’s a prize for the Lab reader who can do it in style.
Pyschologists report in Science that you’re more likely to think warmly of someone else if you’re holding something warm in your hand like a mug of coffee or tea. The experimenters, Lawrence Williams of the University of Colorado and John Bargh of Yale, gave cups of either hot or iced coffee to people and asked them to rate someone’s personality based on a packet of information. The ones who held the hot cup rated that individual significantly higher for “warmth” than did the subjects holding the iced coffee. Read More...
08.15.08 Research by Williams and Bargh Featured in Scientific American
Arranging for Serenity: How Physical Space and Emotion Intersect
The concept of "psychological distance" may help explain the art of feng shui. Click here to go to the article.
Psychologists have some ideas about this connection among physical space and thought and emotion—or what they call “psychological distance.” We have all had the sensation of being “too close” to a situation, needing to “get away” and “putting some distance” between ourselves and others. Our sense of emotional connectedness (or lack of it) is tightly entangled with our perception of geography and patterns in space.
Lawrence E. Williams and John A. Bargh, two Yale University psychologists, decided to explore the power of these perceptions in the laboratory, to see if indeed an ordered, open space affects people’s emotions differently than a tighter, more closed-in environment does. Put another way, do we automatically embody and “feel” things such as crowding or spaciousness, clutter or order? Read More...