Welcome to the Weekly Medius PsychNews. Every week, we select five thought-provoking Psychology articles from hundreds published in journals and other media. Psychology Drives Everything.

Mental Illness: Brain Disease or Gut Disease?
Almost 30 years ago, the U.S National Institute of Health declared the 1990s "the decade of the brain." Since then, considerable funding has been devoted to psychiatric research exploring various aspects of brain science. Some scholars have argued that this was a nodal point in the history of psychiatry, marking a reorientation from a biopsychosocial model to a "bio-bio-bio model," which remains dominant today. This emphasizes three factors: neuroscience, psychiatric genetics and psychopharmacology. Full article.


Trust in Leaders, Sense of Belonging Stir People to Safeguard Common Goods, Analysis Shows:
Every day, people donate to charities, volunteer to clean up city parks, or scale back their driving to curb air pollution. But some take these public goods for granted and ride free on the efforts of others. They watch public television but never make a donation to fund it. Or they run their lawn sprinklers during a drought while their neighbors follow government pleas to limit water consumption. A report in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines more than 25 years’ worth of studies on the use and support of public goods ranging from radio broadcasts to drinking water. Psychological researcher Craig Parks (Washington State University, Pullman) and his co-authors emphasize the urgent need to broaden thoughtful use of public goods, noting that charitable contributions are at historic lows, fossil fuel reserves are shrinking, and climate change threatens the planet’s future. Full article.

 

 

Employee Honesty Depends on One Belief:
Is being honest a lot of work? The answer to that question can affect how dishonestly people behave at work, research finds. Julia Lee of the University of Michigan says the prevalence and high cost of employee fraud inspired the research. Estimates put the cost at up to $3.7 trillion worldwide of dishonest behavior by employees. "There is so much research on whether morality or doing the right thing is driven by deliberation or moral intuition," says Lee, assistant professor of management and organizations at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and lead author of the study to appear in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Full article.

How the Antisocial Mind Deals With Trust:
Humans, probably more so than any other species, rely on their ability to infer the mental states of their counterparts in their day-to-day social interactions. Social neuroscientists refer to this ability as “theory of mind” or “mentalizing.” This ability allows us to take the perspective of our interaction partners and infer their thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, likely by simulating how we would react in similar situations. One prominent theory concerned with the evolution of human social cognition (the social brain hypothesis) claims that our ability to read others' minds, or to predict their intentions and infer their beliefs, has evolved because of the social pressures that came along with living together in ever larger groups a few million years ago. While living in groups proved to be advantageous to our ancestors, because it offered protection from predators and promised greater hunting success, the possibility of betrayal by other group members became omnipresent. Despite our contribution to the public good, others might not share the resources that we have worked to accumulate and protect. Full article.