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.

 

 How to Give Better Advice:
When Greg Dyke accepted the job as the BBC’s new director-general in early 2000, he found a troubled organization in need of reform. Other executives advised him to start off by presenting a clear vision for the broadcasting company and then implement it by directing and delegating. Dyke took a different approach: he traveled for five months before stepping into his new role, visiting offices across the UK, and asking BBC employees what he should do to make things better for them, for viewers, and for listeners. His approach paid off: within Dyke’s first year on the job, television ratings increased for both BBC1 and BBC2, and BBC radio reached record audiences. Full article.


People are “consistently inconsistent” in how they reason about controversial scientific topics:
There are various issues on which there is a scientific consensus but great public controversy, such as anthropogenic climate change and the safety of vaccines. One previously popular explanation for this mismatch was that an information deficit among the public is to blame. Give people all the facts and then, according to this perspective, the public will catch up with the scientists. Yet time and again, that simply hasn’t happened. A new paper in Thinking and Reasoning explores the roots of this problem further. Full article. In 2015, a statistic about social media use captured the Internet’s attention: "More people have died of selfies than shark attacks this year.” To be fair, very few people die of either selfies or shark attacks. But a wave of research continues to suggest that social media use can be a significant impediment to mental health. A new study points specifically to selfies as a mood and confidence-lowering activity. Full article.   
The Problem With Being Perfect:
When the psychologist Jessica Pryor lived near an internationally renowned university, she once saw a student walking into a library holding a sleeping bag and a coffee maker. She’s heard of grad students spending 12 to 18 hours at a time in the lab. Their schedules are meant to be literally punishing: If they’re scientists-in-training, they won’t allow themselves to watch Netflix until their experiments start generating results. “Relationships become estranged—people stop inviting them to things, which leads them to spend even more time in the lab,” Pryor told me. Full article.
Ethical Free Riding: When Honest People Find Dishonest Partners:
Corruption is often the product of coordinated rule violations. Here, we investigated how such corrupt collaboration emerges and spreads when people can choose their partners versus when they cannot. Participants were assigned a partner and could increase their payoff by coordinated lying. After several interactions, they were either free to choose whether to stay with or switch their partner or forced to stay with or switch their partner. Results reveal that both dishonest and honest people exploit the freedom to choose a partner. Dishonest people seek a partner who will also lie—a “partner in crime.” Honest people, by contrast, engage in ethical free riding: They refrain from lying but also from leaving dishonest partners, taking advantage of their partners’ lies. We conclude that to curb collaborative corruption, relying on people’s honesty is insufficient. Encouraging honest individuals not to engage in ethical free riding is essential. Full article.