Month: July 2006

In General Psychology, we use the David Myers text, and it describes some experiments on domestication in Russia, which have shown domesticated foxes to be produced in a relatively short number of generations through Mendelian genetics. The New York Times has an article on the recent activity of this Russian research enterprise.

There was far more to Belyaev’s experiment than the production of tame foxes. He developed a parallel colony of vicious foxes, and he started domesticating other animals, like river otters and mink. Realizing that genetics can be better studied in smaller animals, Belyaev also started a study of rats, beginning with wild rats caught locally. His rat experiment was continued after his death by Irina Plyusnina. Siberian gray rats caught in the wild, bred separately for tameness and for ferocity, have developed these entirely different behaviors in only 60 or so generations.

Link to the article.

Technorati Tags: behavioral genetics, psychology

… is the title of an article that came to mind when I was reading the news this morning. In the day class, we’ve just finished studying Social Psychology, and this is relevant. Lee Ross is a social psychologist (who originated the term “fundamental attribution error”), who studies the social cognitive aspects of conflict and negotiation (among other things). The APS (Association for Psychological Science) Observer magazine covered a talk he gave at the APS convention a couple years ago.

In the article he describes “Naïve Realism,” a process where we all see our own perspective as “right,” and the perspective of others is devalued, ignored, or just not taken. Here’s one of his experimental findings:

During one experiment, Ross took Israeli created peace proposals, labeled them as Arab proposals, and showed them to Israelis.

“The Israelis liked the Palestinian proposal attributed to Israel more than they liked the Israeli proposal attributed to the Palestinians,” Ross said. “If your own proposal isn’t going to be attractive to you when it comes from the other side, what chance is there that the other side’s proposal is going to be attractive when it comes from the other side?”

So even though the Israelis understand that Palestinians see the world a certain way because they’re Palestinian, they believe being Israeli is central to understanding the issue, and that being a Palestinian blinds you to reality. (The case also holds true vice versa.)

link to the article from the APS Observer.

Technorati Tags: aggression, attitudes, cognition, peace psychology, psychology, social psychology

Mind Hacks pointed me toward an article on deja vu from the New York Times:

The accepted scientific definition of déjà vu, put forth in 1983 by a Seattle-based psychiatrist named Vernon Neppe, is “any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present experience with an undefined past.” Beyond the definition, however, the scientific understanding of this “inappropriate familiarity” remains murky. Religion and parapsychology have offered their own explanations, citing déjà vu as evidence for everything from clairvoyance to past lives. Because the phenomenon is difficult if not impossible to reproduce in a laboratory, though, researchers like Moulin have traditionally had limited means to dispel the conventional wisdom.

Technorati Tags: cognition, memory, psychology