Dr. Sabiha Alam Choudhury: November 2020

Our Feelings Towards People Expressing Empathy Depend On Who They’re Empathising With

We tend to think of empathy as a wholly positive thing, a trait that’s not only favourable to possess but that we should actively foster. Books and courses promise to reveal secret wells of empathy and ways to channel them; some people even charge for “empathy readings”, a service that seems to sit somewhere between a psychic reading and a therapy session.

It would be easy to assume, therefore, that people who express empathy are generally well-liked. But a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology finds that our feelings towards “empathisers” depends on who they are empathising with. While empathisers were considered warmer overall, participants judged people who expressed empathy for those with troubling political views more harshly — suggesting that we don’t always interpret empathy as a pure moral virtue.

In the first study, 464 participants were shown a scenario in which Ann (the “target”) and Beth (the “responder”) were meeting for the first time. In one condition, Ann worked for a children’s hospital; in the other, she worked for a white supremacist group.

Participants then read a conversation between the pair, with Ann telling Beth about a stressful experience at work planning an event for a large group of people. Those in the “empathic response” condition heard that Beth empathised with Ann, while other participants read that Beth gave a non-committal response. Finally, participants indicated how much they liked, respected, trusted and would like to be friends with Beth as well as how caring, kind and understanding they felt she was.

As expected, participants respected and liked Beth more, and considered her more warm, when she answered empathetically in the scenario where Ann worked at a hospital. When Ann worked for a white supremacist group, however, participants did not like Beth more or less depending on her response — though they did perceive her as slightly warmer when she was empathetic. These results were replicated in a second study in which Ann was presented as pro- or anti-vaccination. And in a third, participants liked Beth less when she empathised with a positive experience recounted by white supremacist Ann.

In the next study, participants saw the same information from the first studies, including the same empathetic response from Beth. But this time, the non-empathetic response was actively condemning: participants heard that Beth told Ann that it “sounds to me like you’re getting what you deserve”. And participants liked and respected Beth more when she gave this negative response to white supremacist Ann (though she was still considered warmer when responding empathetically). This was also the case in a follow-up study replacing Ann and Beth with male figures, suggesting that the effect is not gendered.

“Empathy towards white supremacists isn’t favourably looked upon” isn’t hugely shocking news. But the study does shed some light on the way we think about empathy in general. As noted, empathy is often depicted as an uncomplicated moral good — something we should unconditionally strive for. But the results suggest a more complex situation, where empathy is morally relative rather than absolute. This is also evident in assessments of warmth, another seemingly straightforward trait — even when participants didn’t like or respect Beth, they still considered her warm.

Further research could look at how this impacts behaviour — that is, are we less likely to be friends with or act positively towards someone who has empathised with a group or person we dislike? And how does this affect processes like voting or endorsing particular political candidates?

Though we tend to think of empathy as something that exists between two people or groups, we rarely think about the third party observers witnessing it. But as the study shows, understanding the broader social context of empathy may help us better understand its true effects.

– Evaluations of empathizers depend on the target of empathy.

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

We Are Less Likely To Dehumanise Prisoners Who Are Approaching The End Of Their Sentence

By Emma Young

Criminals are often characterised in the popular press as “animals” or “cold-blooded”. Such adjectives effectively dehumanise them, and there’s no end of research finding that if we deny fully human emotional and thinking capacities to other people, we are less likely to treat them in a humane way. But how long does prisoner dehumanisation last? Is it a life sentence? Or, wondered the authors of a new paper, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, does it depend on how long a prisoner has left to serve?

Jason C. Deska at Ryerson University in Canada and his colleagues ran a series of seven studies to investigate this. In each, participants viewed a series of 20 mugshots of White men imprisoned in Florida. Though the mugshots were of real prisoners, the team manipulated the accompanying information, so that each man’s sentence was stated as being around 1,460 days (four years), and they had either served around one month or had only about one month left in prison.

The first two studies, on 148 students and then 155 adults recruited online, revealed that the participants ascribed greater mental sophistication to the prisoners who were about to be released than to those who had only just started their sentences. These prisoners were credited with having greater emotional and cognitive faculties as well as greater agency — an ability to act according to their own individual intentions. They were, in other words, subject to less dehumanisation.

In the next five studies, the researchers further explored what they called the “time-to-serve effect”. They investigated the potential role of the participants’ beliefs about the four primary functions of incarceration, as identified by laypeople as well as experts in criminal justice. These are: rehabilitation, retribution, deterrence (from committing another crime) and incapacitation (removing criminals from society, to prevent them from harming anyone else). In each study, fresh batches of online participants viewed the same 20 mugshots, along with sentencing information. But as well as completing the Mind Attribution Scale, which measured any dehumanisation, participants also rated the extent to which they felt that the prisoner had either been rehabilitated, punished, deterred or incapacitated. (Each study included just one of these mini-scales.)

Soon-to-be-released prisoners were seen as being more rehabilitated, more adequately punished, and more likely to have been deterred from committing future crimes. These perceptions in turn led people to view the prisoners approaching the end of their sentence as more “human”. The researchers stress that they are not arguing that prison is an effective deterrent, or that punishment causes prisoners to gain mental sophistication — rather, that beliefs about how well the functions of prison have been met seem to affect levels of dehumanisation of prisoners.

In the final study, participants completed all three of these scales, rather than just one. This time, only beliefs relating to levels of rehabilitation and deterrence — and not retribution — emerged as being important for driving the “time to serve” effect.

As the team notes, deterrence and retribution both involve the infliction of pain on the individual, but only deterrence seeks to change that person. Effective rehabilitation and deterrence both entail changes in the prisoner’s mental state, and, it seems, either less dehumanisation by others, or a restoration of ascriptions of typical human capacities.

“Prisoners are a chronically dehumanized social group,” the team notes. Given work finding that dehumanisation of prisoners “both impedes successful rehabilitation and facilitates inhumane treatment”, it’s clearly important to understand the circumstances and beliefs that can affect these kinds of views.

“Although our data cannot speak to how effective incarceration is for actual rehabilitation and deterrence, they do suggest that emphasising these functions of incarceration may be especially important for interventions designed at integrating ex-convicts back into society,” the team concludes. Well, they do if that society comprises mostly White Americans, and if the prisoners are all White males, as was the case here. As the researchers themselves note, “Future work would do well to examine how diverse participants in non-WEIRD cultures dehumanize prisoners across the course of their prison term.” Different cultural attitudes, and also the nature of a prisoner’s crime (in these studies, the crimes were deliberately not identified) could clearly affect prisoner dehumanisation, too. But these are interesting first steps to a deeper understanding of which beliefs lead us to dehumanise prisoners, and how they might be modified.

– Dehumanizing Prisoners: Remaining Sentence Duration Predicts the Ascription of Mind to Prisoners

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Here’s How The Brain Responds When We Feel Our Parents’ Joy

By Emma Young

You scrape off the panels on a lottery scratch card… and you’re a winner! Brain imaging would show a burst of activity in a region called the nucleus accumbens, in the ventral striatum, a region known to code the impact of reward-related stimuli, such as getting money. But how the brain handles so-called vicarious joy — the type you might feel if you scraped winning panels from a relative’s scratch card, or even a stranger’s — is not well understood. Now a new study, published in Cognitive, Affective & Behavioural Neuroscience, shows that while there are similarities, there are also some important differences. Notably, the participants’ brains responded differently when they won money for their mother versus their father.

Philip Bradner at Erasmus University in the Netherlands led the study of 30 mostly undergraduate students, with an average age of 22. They all had a mother and a father as their parents, and none had a history of mental health issues. (In fact, they were deliberately chosen to be similar, to make for a more homogenous sample.)

While in an fMRI scanner, the participants played a simple game in which they, or one other person, could win money. In each trial, this other “player” was identified as either their mother, father, or simply as a “stranger”. All the participants had to do was click a button to choose which of two animated curtains to open. This revealed a small win for themselves and/or the other person. (And any money won for themselves or their mother or father was passed on.) After this, the participants rated how emotionally close they felt to their mother, father and to strangers, in general. They also reported on how much they liked winning for themselves, or for each parent or a stranger.

As expected from earlier research, when a participant won money for themselves, Bradner and his colleagues saw increased activity in the nucleus accumbens. But they also discovered greater activation in the nucleus accumbens when the participants won money for their mother or father, compared to when they won money for a stranger. The participants also reported “liking” winning for both parents more than for a stranger. This suggests that the nucleus accumbens is involved in feeling both direct, personal joy and also vicarious joy.

However, the participants’ brain responses also showed some differences depending on whether the other player was identified as their father or mother. When they won money for their father (but not their mother), other regions of the brain, including the medial prefrontal cortex and the precuneus, became more active.

These regions seem, then, to be important for processing vicarious joy for fathers. They are also known to be important for representing “self” vs “other” — for distinguishing between what we are experiencing directly, versus what someone else is experiencing, for example. It’s possible, then, that winning for fathers triggers stronger self/other comparisons than winning for mothers, the team writes. For these young people, at least, it seems that their mother was more integrated with their “self” representation.

This theory was supported by the additional finding that when participants won money for themselves and their father won nothing, there was less activation in the nucleus accumbens compared with when they won money and their mother didn’t. If winning against a father triggers greater self/other comparisons, then participants may process this win as a gain only for themselves, and as a relative “loss” for their father — but when the mother is the other player, winning might be a more straightforward, unmitigated joy.

The study does have various limitations. For one, because the participants were deliberately chosen to be similar, it’s not clear whether the results would hold for other groups of people, such as those with same-sex parents or from single parent households. It would also be interesting to explores effects in children of less well-adjusted families, who may feel less close to their parents, and may not experience vicarious joy in the same way. But the finding of differences in how the participants’ brains responded to rewards for fathers versus mothers is certainly interesting. If it isn’t driven by differences in emotional closeness, which it doesn’t seem to be, what, exactly, does drive it? Only further research will tell. As the team concludes, “An intriguing question for future research concerns the divergence in neural processing between mothers and fathers.”

– I am happy for us: Neural processing of vicarious joy when winning for parents versus strangers

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

People Are More Positive About Hacking When They Feel They’ve Been Treated Unfairly

By Emily Reynolds

Type the word “hacker” into any stock photo search engine and you’ll be greeted with pages and pages of images of someone sitting in the dark, typing threateningly at their laptop, and more often than not wearing a balaclava or Guy Fawkes mask. That Matrix-inspired 1990s aesthetic of green code on black is still prevalent — and still implies that hackers have inherently nefarious ends.

More recently, however, the idea of hacking as a prosocial activity has gained more attention. Earlier this year, one group of hackers made headlines for donating $10,000 in Bitcoin to two charities, the result of what they say was the extortion of millions of dollars from multinational companies.

While the charities declined the donations, social media responses were more mixed, with some praising the hackers. And in a new study, Maria S. Heering and colleagues from the University of Kent argue that our view of hacking is somewhat malleable: when people were treated unfairly and the institutions responsible did nothing to redress their grievances, they felt more positive about hackers who targeted the source of their anger.

In the first study, 259 participants were asked to imagine themselves taking an exam which was crucial to their future career prospects. The questions in the exam, they were told, were vague and unrelated to the content they’d been taught — and when looking at the transcript after the exam, they found they had been marked unfairly. Participants were then asked to imagine taking their grievance to the university with several classmates.

Following this introductory scenario, participants were split into two groups and given different information about how responsive the university was (these kinds of beliefs about the responsiveness of an institution are known as “external efficacy”). Half of the participants read that the university system was unresponsive to their requests (low external efficacy); the others read that the university was willing to address their complaints (high external efficacy).

Participants then completed measures related to their anger against the system (e.g. “I am furious about the way in which the exam office handled my complaint”) before reading that the university had been targeted by hackers, who left the message “learn to do your job” on the institution’s homepage.

Finally, participants indicated how much they agreed with statements related to the hackers’ legitimacy, whether or not the hackers deserve respect and admiration, and how positive or negative they felt the hackers’ actions were for both the university and democracy more generally.

As expected, participants who read that the university had been unresponsive to their unfair treatment felt more anger towards the system; in turn, this anger led to stronger feelings that hackers’ actions were legitimate.

A second study replicated the first, only this time participants were told that a researcher had rejected the work they had submitted on an academic survey platform. In the low external efficacy condition, the site did not help participants who felt their work had been unfairly rejected, and in the high external efficacy condition participants received support and were told a new system would be put in place to query rejected work. All participants again read that hackers had targeted the platform and left the same “learn to do your job” message.

As in the first study, participants felt more anger against the platform in the low external efficacy condition — and again, this anger positively predicted how legitimate they perceived the hacking to be.

On a small scale, it may seem obvious that if someone attacks a system or institution you feel has wronged you, you’re likely to be supportive of them. But the results also prompt interesting questions about wider society. The team notes that the key factor determining legitimisation of hackers is an unmet demand for fairer social arrangements — an issue that comes to the fore time and time again on both big and small scales. During lockdown, for example, much attention has been paid to the increase in wealth of a few very rich individuals whilst others around the world struggle to make ends meet.

In cases of wider societal unfairness, therefore, our views of those who disrupt that uneven power imbalance may become more and positive. In an age where trust appears to have been eroded precisely because people feel their demands are not being met, it’s worth exploring these issues in more detail.

– “If they don’t listen to us, they deserve it”: The effect of external efficacy and anger on the perceived legitimacy of hacking

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Study Finds People Who Played Video Games For Longer Had Greater Wellbeing (But Direction Of Causality Isn’t Yet Clear)

Photo: A user plays Animal Crossing, one of the games studied in the new research. William West/AFP via Getty Images

By Matthew Warren

Video games get blamed for a lot. There are long-standing debates about whether violence in video games leads to real-world aggression, or whether video game “addiction” is something we should worry about. And some people have broader fears that more time spent on screens negatively affects our mental health and wellbeing.

However, an increasing number of studies have failed to find much evidence to back up these kinds of concerns. But the field suffers from some pretty big limitations. In particular, studies often rely on people reporting their own time spent consuming media — and we’re notoriously unreliable at making those sorts of estimates.

Enter a new study from Niklas Johannes and colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute, published as a preprint on PsyArxiv earlier this week. The researchers find that more time spent playing video games actually relates to greater wellbeing (though there are plenty of caveats to that finding — more on those later). But the most interesting part of the study is really its methodology: rather than relying on people reporting their own video game use, the researchers established a rare collaboration with games companies in order to get precise data.

Two companies, Electronic Arts and Nintendo, provided the team with data from players of Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons respectively. The companies sent out surveys to hundreds of thousands of adult players; these included a wellbeing measure, in which participants rated how often they’d experienced six positive and six negative feelings in the past two weeks. Crucially, the companies also provided data on the number and length of the players’ gaming sessions during those two weeks.

Only a fraction of people responded, ultimately leaving the team with data from 471 Plants vs Zombies players and 2,756 Animal Crossing players. And they found that, overall, the more time people spent playing over that two week period, the greater their wellbeing tended to be. It’s worth noting that although significant, this effect was small: even a large increase in time spent playing was related to a very modest increase in wellbeing. Importantly, the data also showed that people weren’t great at estimating how long they had spent playing over the two week period — their estimates were off by about two hours, highlighting the problems of relying just on self-report data.

The results, then, cast further doubt on the idea that spending more time playing video games is detrimental to our mental health. In fact, the study suggests that there is some kind of link between playing video games for longer and greater wellbeing. This is clearly noteworthy, as so much of the discussion around video games (and screen time generally) just assumes that limiting the time spent playing is a good thing, without acknowledging that it could potentially have detrimental effects.

But, inevitably, over the past few days we’ve seen a lot of headlines proclaiming that video games are “good for wellbeing” or “benefit mental health”. That may well be true. But it’s not really possible to make those kinds of claims from the study’s correlational data. Perhaps people who are happier play video games for longer. Or maybe it’s something else entirely that both leads people to play video games for longer and boosts wellbeing (having the luxury of free time, for example). And even if there is a causal link, it’s not clear that it would be a meaningful one, given that the size of the effect was so small.

There are other limitations too. The data comes from the small group of people who chose to complete the survey, all of whom were over 18. So the study can’t necessarily say much about potential effects among the broader population, particularly young people. And it remains to be seen whether time spent playing other kinds of games relates to similar changes in wellbeing.

It’s important to point out that the authors do go to lengths to explain these limitations in the paper. But it feels like the nuances have been brushed over in much of the media coverage.

Still, none of this should detract from the most interesting and exciting part of the study: the fact that the researchers have collaborated with industry and obtained real data on people’s playing habits. The lack of access to data from media companies has long been a major obstacle to this kind of work, as Amy Orben told us earlier this year. Perhaps this study will pave the way for further collaboration. Indeed, the researchers call on companies to share data from other games and audiences, and across longer time-scales. Hopefully this kind of data will help to answer some of the intriguing questions that the study poses.

– Video game play is positively correlated with well-being [this paper is a preprint meaning that it has not yet been subjected to peer review and the final published version may differ from the version this report was based on]

Matthew Warren (@MattBWarren) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Babies Relax When Listening To Unfamiliar Lullabies From Other Cultures

By Emma Young

The controversial idea that there are universals in the ways we use music received a boost in 2018, with the finding that people from 60 different countries were pretty good at judging whether a totally unfamiliar piece of music from another culture was intended to soothe a baby or to be danced to. Now, new research involving some of the same team has revealed that foreign lullabies that babies have never heard before work to relax them.

Constance M. Bainbridge and Mila Bertolo from Harvard University led the new study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, on 144 babies with an average age of 7 months. After being fitted with sensors to monitor their heart rate and level of sweating, each baby sat in a high chair or recliner or on its parent’s lap while watching animated characters lip-synching to 14-second bursts of songs. These songs came from the Natural History of Song Discography, a collection of songs from around the world, and eight were used as lullabies in the societies in which they were selected. The rest were intended to express love, heal the sick or be danced to. All of the songs were sung by solo vocalists, without background music.

As well as looking at the heart rate and skin sweating data, the team used video of the babies’ faces to monitor their pupil size. If these measures decreased, this would indicate that the baby was relaxing.

Based on some of these measures, at least, the team found that babies did indeed seem more relaxed during the lullabies than the other songs. “While heart rates dropped almost immediately following the onset of singing, regardless of song type, this drop was more pronounced during the lullabies,” the team writes. Whether the baby was 2 or 14 months old, the effect was the same, suggesting that it couldn’t simply be the result of exposure to music with age. The team also found that the babies’ pupils were smaller during the lullabies than the other songs.

The sweating results were less clear cut, however. These levels increased over the course of the experiment, perhaps because the babies were becoming more bored and fussy, the researchers suggest. But while a baby listened to a lullaby, this increase was temporarily slowed.

What might explain these effects? The lullabies and the other songs certainly differed acoustically. The lullabies tended to be slower, and to have smaller pitch ranges and a less steady beat. As the researchers note, the earlier work on adults listening to unfamiliar songs found that the more a song was characterised by these specific features, the more confident a listener was that it was intended to be a lullaby. The team then compared these earlier adult ratings with their new results. And they found that the more that the adults had judged a song to be directed towards infants, the bigger the reduction in heart rate while the baby listened to it. “This result confirms that the acoustic effects of the songs drove the relaxation effects on them,” the team writes.

As they stress, the babies and their parents “were unfamiliar with the songs they heard, unfamiliar with the languages they were sung in and unfamiliar with the musical styles of the societies that originally produced the songs.” All the babies in the present study were American, but the researchers suspect that babies from other cultures would react in the same way. (In fact, they are now “eager to find out whether they do so”.)

The new work does open up some fascinating questions, such as: which of the acoustic features of lullabies are most important for the relaxation effect? And: do babies like lullabies more than other songs (or just find them more relaxing)? Also: what impact might lullabies have on a baby’s ongoing health? Numerous studies have found that music can help adults with chronic pain or depression, for example. “Music may also play an everyday role in improving health in infants,” the researchers write, “a role it has taken on across cultures and across human history.”

– Infants relax in response to unfamiliar foreign lullabies

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Climate Change Appeals May Be More Effective When They’re Pessimistic

By Emily Reynolds

There’s no getting around the fact that climate change is an existential crisis of the highest order — but how best to communicate that threat is unclear. Too much pessimism and people become paralysed with anxiety, pushing thoughts about the crisis away altogether. Too much optimism, on the other hand, can lead to complacency — if things are going to be okay, why would we feel the need to engage with what’s going on?

It’s this tension that Brandi S. Morris and colleagues from Aarhus University explore in a new study, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. They suggest that climate change appeals with pessimistic endings could trigger higher engagement with the issue than those that end on an optimistic note.

In the first study, 200 participants were presented with a transcript of a video about bees and climate change that had either an optimistic or pessimistic ending: in the optimistic condition, participants read that younger beekeepers were learning about and taking action on climate change, while in the pessimistic condition they read that bees were dying “at an alarming rate”. After this, they answered questions about their emotional response (e.g. how emotionally intense it had been to read the article), their beliefs in climate change (how much of a risk they feel it poses to human health), and their political ideology.

Participants in the pessimistic condition felt that climate change was more of a risk than those in the optimistic condition, and also reported higher emotional arousal. There was a direct link between the two: the team found that reading the pessimistic ending triggered greater emotional arousal, which in turn led to greater risk perception. A second study in which participants actually viewed the videos as well as reading the transcripts found a very similar pattern of results.

In both of these studies, people’s politics and worldview also played a part. Conservative participants reported lower levels of risk perception when their emotional arousal was low, as did people with a greater belief in individualism or hierarchy (as compared to collectivism or egalitarianism). But this also meant that emotional arousal triggered more of an increase in risk perception for these groups (compared to more liberal participants, whose risk perception was already high).

In the third and final study, 1,115 participants again saw optimistic and pessimistic materials. This time a third “fatalistic” condition was added, in which participants were told that a reduction in the bee population would mean the “world would crumble” in a mere four years (“No matter what we do about climate change, it’s too late to turn things around”).

After viewing this material, participants filled in the same risk perception and emotional arousal measures, and stated how much they agreed with the statement “I believe my actions have an influence on climate change”.

Participants in both the pessimistic and fatalistic conditions reported higher emotional arousal. And the higher the level of arousal, the more likely a participant was to believe they can make an impact. Political ideology and worldview had similar effects as in the previous studies: belief in ability to change things was particularly low at lower levels of emotional arousal in moderates and conservatives, but increased considerably as a result of increased emotional arousal.

These results suggest that pessimistic messages about climate change may actually boost people’s beliefs that it is a problem and that they can do something to combat it. However, they also imply that those who are creating these kinds of interventions need to think carefully about who they’re aiming to reach and how they intend to do it: if different groups respond differently to positive or negative messaging, then a selection of carefully targeted messages might be more successful than something broader and designed to appeal to everyone.

But ultimately, it’s important not to forget those parties who are really responsible for acting on climate change: governments and corporations. While individuals can of course make a difference, it’s the big polluters who really have to change — according to a Guardian investigation, just twenty fossil fuel companies are linked to a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. Figures like this make individual actions like turning off lights or recycling water bottles pale somewhat in comparison.

Designing successful interventions for climate action is key, and studies like this are an important part of making sure they work. But those designing them would do well to think about the limits of individual behaviour change — and who should really end up feeling responsible.

– Optimistic vs. pessimistic endings in climate change appeals

Emily Reynolds is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

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Credit- BPS Research Digest. Published by- Dr. Sabiha : www.drsabiha.blogspot.com

Spite And Forgiveness: The Week’s Best Psychology Links

Our weekly round-up of the best psychology coverage from elsewhere on the web

A recent study finds political differences in how much stock people put in expert evidence versus personal experience. Liberals tend to see evidence from experts as more legitimate, while conservatives place more equal value on both, write the researchers Randy Stein, Alexander Swan and Michelle Sarraf at The Conversation. This was true even though the scenarios in the study were completely apolitical, the team adds, suggesting that the findings pick up on fundamental differences in worldview between the two camps.

Spitefulness can be antisocial and nasty — but does it also have benefits? At The Guardian, Jamie Waters looks at a new book on the “upside” of spite by Simon McCarthy-Jones.

More this week on the effectiveness — or lack thereof — of unconscious bias training. Companies spend billions on such training every year, writes Allyssia Alleyne at Wired, yet there’s little evidence that it works to change people’s behaviour. And worse, it can allow organisations to appear to be doing something to improve diversity and inclusion, while avoiding putting in the time and resources to achieve real change.

To what extent is our conceptualisation of “forgiveness” held by other people around the world? At BBC Future, William Park has an interesting exploration of the cultural and linguistic differences that determine how we forgive others.

A portion of Covid-19 patients who have recovered report experiencing a mental fuzziness, or “brain fog”. Sara Harrison examines what we know so far about these lingering cognitive effects at Wired.

In the last few years a wealth of evidence has suggested that psychedelic drugs may help to treat particular mental health conditions. At Popular Science, Sarah Scoles reports on work which suggests those effects may be particularly strong when people have a “mystical” experience while on the drug.

Compiled by Matthew Warren (@MattbWarren), Editor of BPS Research Digest

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