Adams Expands Research Flock with Latvian Fulbright Experience
Adams Expands Research Flock with Latvian Fulbright Experience
Thomas Retires as UT Psychology Admin
Thomas Retires as UT Psychology Admin
Thomas Retires as UT Psychology Admin
When Sandy Thomas was looking for a job in 1986, a good friend encouraged her to apply at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Because of the people in the Department of Psychology, she stayed for 38 years.
Thomas started as a “suite secretary,” sharing responsibilities with another staff member and working with about half a dozen professors. After a while she started working for the director of undergraduate studies, and her responsibilities evolved to include scheduling and registration. She was an administrative specialist before her retirement in August, also serving as a departmental liaison for students and planning the annual awards night.
“Working with students is one of the main reasons I stayed at UT,” Thomas said.
They appreciated her too, with several naming her in the acknowledgements of their doctoral dissertations. Before the work moved to personal computers, Thomas explained, she typed many graduate students’ dissertations.
Thomas also represented the College of Arts and Sciences for numerous years on the Employee Relations Committee (ERC). “I feel that the ERC is a very important outlet for staff to voice their concerns as well as share ideas to help make changes to benefit all staff,” she said.
“UT is a great place to work,” she said. “It is not always perfect, but just have patience and work through any rough times,” she advised. “It will be worth it.”
By Amy Beth Miller
Burghardt honored by Animal Behavior Society
Burghardt honored by Animal Behavior Society
Burghardt honored by Animal Behavior Society
Animal behavior captivated Gordon Burghardt as a boy, and over more than half a century at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, his interdisciplinary research advanced ethology in areas including animal play, social behavior, communication, reptile behavior, enrichment, and animal cognitive abilities.
The Animal Behavior Society (ABS) recognized his outstanding lifetime achievement by awarding Burghardt the 2024 Distinguished Animal Behaviorist Award during its annual meeting in late June.
Interest to Interdisciplinary Investigation
During his childhood in Wisconsin, Burghardt collected snakes. He also developed an interest in chemistry, and that was his major when he entered the University of Chicago in 1959. Despite his curiosity about animals, Burghardt said, “I was always told you couldn’t make a career, support a family, studying biology at that time.”
A class on animal behavior with Eckhard Hess led Burghardt to major in biopsychology, earning his PhD in 1966. He was drawn to UT by the head of the Department of Psychology, William S. Verplanck, who had worked with B.F. Skinner and other leading psychologists.
“The faculty were bright and young and growing, and they had a lot of people in experimental psychology working with animals,” Burghardt said. “I came, and I’ve been able to develop my own programs and courses, and had many grad students doing research.”
He founded a UT interdisciplinary Life Sciences Graduate Program in Ethology in 1981, one of several designed to break down departmental silos.
Although Burghardt started as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology in 1968, he was always involved with the Department of Zoology and its graduate students. He noted the interdepartmental cooperation and collegial, supportive relationships within and between departments. “That’s developed even more now,” he said, pointing to the number of joint appointments. “I was the first one,” he said, also becoming a professor in the Department of Zoology in 1995 (now the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, or EEB).
Burghardt has worked with chemists, too, to research snakes’ chemical senses. He became one of the first editorial board members of The Journal of Chemical Ecology, one of numerous publications on which he has worked. He has served in leadership positions with multiple professional organizations too, including ABS and the American Psychological Association.
Burghardt’s excitement is evident when he talks about the first time he observed neonate snakes responding to prey chemicals, and he’s still publishing research on snake chemoreception.
Studying Play
Shortly after Burghardt arrived at UT, the university forged a relationship with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for research on black bears, which were experiencing troubling encounters with tourists.
In 1970, two cubs found in the Smokies without their mother spent about seven weeks at Burghardt’s Knoxville home, until an area was ready for them in the park. The experience gave him an unusual observation opportunity.
“They were super playful,” Burghardt said. “They were the most playful animals that I’ve ever seen.”
That opened a new area for research, and Burghardt not only developed a definition of play but with his colleagues was the first to definitively document play in fish, turtles, and other species.
In 2005, his book The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits (MIT Press) examined the origins and evolution of play, reviewing evidence from species ranging from human babies to lizards, sharks, octopus, and insects. He has contributed to several other books on the topic, and his research also is extensively cited in the 2024 book Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself, by David Toomey.
Serpents, Iguanas, and Other Reptiles
Burghardt’s fascination with snakes led to numerous studies, with subjects ranging from neonates to a two-headed rat snake named IM that lived for decades in his lab.
He also taught a course on the psychology of religion, when it was a joint course with the Department of Religious Studies. “Snakes are the most important animal in religions,” he said, pointing around his office in the Austin Peay Memorial Building to artifacts and books from several faiths.
A trip to Panama to look at snakes led to his research on social behavior of newly hatched iguanas, uncovering social complexity unheard of in reptiles. Burghardt was unable to attend the ABS ceremony in Ontario to receive his award because it conflicted with his attending a centennial symposium at Barro Colorado Island, part of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, where he and his students observed the iguanas.
He and then-student Brian Bock served as scientific advisors on a British Broadcasting Corp. episode of Wildlife on One, “Iguanas, Living Like Dinosaurs,” narrated by David Attenborough.
Burghardt and his colleagues also studied a Komodo dragon named Kraken at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and later a Komodo dragon at Zoo Knoxville, also featured in two documentary films on play.
He is co-author of the 2021 book The Secret Social Lives of Reptiles and editor on the second edition of Health and Welfare of Captive Reptiles.
“It was really important that the university supported and appreciated the kind of stuff that I was doing, even though it was not at all traditional in terms of what psychologists typically do,” he said. “My work, I think, has been pretty well recognized, as this award shows, so I was on to something.”
While Burghardt still serves on a couple committees of graduate students completing their dissertations, he notes that some of his former students are retiring.
“I just retired two years ago, but they’re not hanging on until 80, like I did,” he said. “Doing my research, what I wanted to do, keeps you younger.”
“I really love the field of animal behavior and feel that I’m still able to make substantial contributions,” said Burghardt, who in addition to publishing his own research is founding editor of a new journal, Frontiers in Ethology.
By Amy Beth Miller
Garriy Shteynberg in ‘The Conversation’ Podcast: Sharing that moment: can collective experiences bring people closer together?
Garriy Shteynberg in ‘The Conversation’ Podcast: Sharing that moment: can collective experiences bring people closer together?
Garriy Shteynberg in ‘The Conversation’ Podcast: Sharing that moment: can collective experiences bring people closer together?
Gemma Ware, The Conversation
Across the world, fans will soon be tuning in at all hours of the day and night to watch the Paris Olympics. In a world where on-demand media streaming is now increasingly the norm, sport is something of a rarity. It’s watched live, often with other people. The joy, or heartbreak, is shared.
Can something as simple as watching a sporting competition at the same time bring people closer together? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we explore this question with a psychologist who studies the impact of shared experiences.
In his experimental psychology lab at the University of Tennessee, Garriy Shteynberg creates situations in which his test subjects go through an experience together. “We’re trying to amp up this feeling of shared experience or shared attention,” he explains. It could be watching a video together, something sad, or funny. Or asking people to work towards a goal, such as memorising a list of words.
The results suggest that, when compared to control conditions in which someone experiences something alone or at a slightly different time to others, the shared attention of experiencing something together amplifies the experience and can even give people more motivation to complete a task.
We found that if I give you a surprise test after the fact, if you co-experience the list of words, you’re better able to recall that list versus if you experience them alone. If we co-experience an emotional scene, we find that people feel more emotional … so if it’s a happy scene, people feel happier … if it’s a sad scene … people feel sadder. It amplifies whatever that stimulus is.
Collective mind
Shteynberg’s experiments led him to develop what he calls the theory of the collective mind.
The idea is that our individual minds not only track where we diverge, but they also track where we converge with others. When you create a collective mind, it’s as if the perspective broadens, it becomes a “we perspective”.
His own experience of immigrating to the US from the Soviet Union as a child influences Shteynberg’s thinking about collective perspectives.
In the Soviet Union, collective consciousness was emphasised all the time. In the United States, it’s quite the opposite. Most of the time, collective consciousness is something to be afraid of. It is something that put in the background. You want individual consciousness, individual reasoning. Both of those outlooks are mistaken in a way.
He argues that people have individual thoughts and experiences, and simultaneously, they also have collective ones. Both of those matter to how they experiences the world.
Shteynberg is now interested in whether shared experiences can also help bring people together, particularly in the context of increasing political polarisation.
Shared experiences form this minimal social connection that doesn’t require us to share identities, ideologies or even beliefs … The idea that we are in the same room together, that we might be watching the same news is an important social bridge upon which things can be built.
Shteynberg says that in many different ways, irrespective of their politics, people believe they share a basic experience with others, whether that’s how they live, work, or even watching something like the Olympics on TV.
I think the focus being on the deep division and that always being front and centre of our shared experience obscures the fact that we are in fact of collective mind to a great number of things.
To listen to the full interview with Garriy Shteynberg about his research, subscribe to The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also features Maggie Villiger, senior science editor at The Conversation in the US. You can also read an article Shteynberg wrote about his research on the collective mind.
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A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.
Newsclips in this episode from BBC Sport.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.
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Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Embrace Endless Opportunities
Embrace Endless Opportunities
Embrace Endless Opportunities
by Randall Brown
Rachel Laribee came to UT Knoxville from Arlington, Tennessee, near Memphis, and will graduate this spring with not just a double major in psychology and women, gender, and sexuality studies, but also a double minor in neuroscience and sociology.
Laribee participated in a project of great cultural significance during her studies, working on the Social Action Research Team with Professor Patrick Grzanka, divisional dean for social sciences within the College of Arts and Sciences.
“Rachel has been an indispensable part of the Social Action Research Team this year,” said Grzanka. “Her commitment to producing rigorous scholarly research on pressing social issues is unparalleled. All the graduate students on the team and my faculty co-investigator came to value Rachel’s precision, attention to detail, and keen analytic insight over the past two years. Her future as a clinician and advocate for youth is the brightest.”
Team members investigated undergraduate emerging adults’ attitudes towards abortion and reproductive rights following the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
“Not only was it a topic that I was deeply interested and passionate about, but it also enabled me to be directly involved in a study from the ground up,” said Laribee. “It made me significantly more confident as a researcher.”
The next stage in Laribee’s career will be working toward her master’s degree in child studies, on a clinical and developmental research track, at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. Then, onward to a PhD program.
She encourages future Vols to embrace projects that take them beyond the classroom.
“I would say that the best thing you can do for your education is engage in diverse research projects,” said Laribee. “I’ve worked with faculty in the College of Nursing, the College of Education, and the College of Arts and Sciences, and all these projects have been incredibly fulfilling and allowed me to learn new things about myself and my interests for a future career. Be brave about reaching out too!”
The College of Arts and Sciences congratulates Rachel Laribee for successfully navigating her interdisciplinary blend of majors and minors and exemplifying the Volunteer Spirit.
The Conversation: ‘Animal behavior research is getting better at keeping observer bias from sneaking in – but there’s still room to improve’
The Conversation: ‘Animal behavior research is getting better at keeping observer bias from sneaking in – but there’s still room to improve’
The Conversation: ‘Animal behavior research is getting better at keeping observer bias from sneaking in – but there’s still room to improve’
Todd M. Freeberg, University of Tennessee
Animal behavior research relies on careful observation of animals. Researchers might spend months in a jungle habitat watching tropical birds mate and raise their young. They might track the rates of physical contact in cattle herds of different densities. Or they could record the sounds whales make as they migrate through the ocean.
Animal behavior research can provide fundamental insights into the natural processes that affect ecosystems around the globe, as well as into our own human minds and behavior.
I study animal behavior – and also the research reported by scientists in my field. One of the challenges of this kind of science is making sure our own assumptions don’t influence what we think we see in animal subjects. Like all people, how scientists see the world is shaped by biases and expectations, which can affect how data is recorded and reported. For instance, scientists who live in a society with strict gender roles for women and men might interpret things they see animals doing as reflecting those same divisions.
The scientific process corrects for such mistakes over time, but scientists have quicker methods at their disposal to minimize potential observer bias. Animal behavior scientists haven’t always used these methods – but that’s changing. A new study confirms that, over the past decade, studies increasingly adhere to the rigorous best practices that can minimize potential biases in animal behavior research.
Biases and self-fulfilling prophecies
A German horse named Clever Hans is widely known in the history of animal behavior as a classic example of unconscious bias leading to a false result.
Around the turn of the 20th century, Clever Hans was purported to be able to do math. For example, in response to his owner’s prompt “3 + 5,” Clever Hans would tap his hoof eight times. His owner would then reward him with his favorite vegetables. Initial observers reported that the horse’s abilities were legitimate and that his owner was not being deceptive.
However, careful analysis by a young scientist named Oskar Pfungst revealed that if the horse could not see his owner, he couldn’t answer correctly. So while Clever Hans was not good at math, he was incredibly good at observing his owner’s subtle and unconscious cues that gave the math answers away.
In the 1960s, researchers asked human study participants to code the learning ability of rats. Participants were told their rats had been artificially selected over many generations to be either “bright” or “dull” learners. Over several weeks, the participants ran their rats through eight different learning experiments.
In seven out of the eight experiments, the human participants ranked the “bright” rats as being better learners than the “dull” rats when, in reality, the researchers had randomly picked rats from their breeding colony. Bias led the human participants to see what they thought they should see.
Eliminating bias
Given the clear potential for human biases to skew scientific results, textbooks on animal behavior research methods from the 1980s onward have implored researchers to verify their work using at least one of two commonsense methods.
One is making sure the researcher observing the behavior does not know if the subject comes from one study group or the other. For example, a researcher would measure a cricket’s behavior without knowing if it came from the experimental or control group.
The other best practice is utilizing a second researcher, who has fresh eyes and no knowledge of the data, to observe the behavior and code the data. For example, while analyzing a video file, I count chickadees taking seeds from a feeder 15 times. Later, a second independent observer counts the same number.
Yet these methods to minimize possible biases are often not employed by researchers in animal behavior, perhaps because these best practices take more time and effort.
In 2012, my colleagues and I reviewed nearly 1,000 articles published in five leading animal behavior journals between 1970 and 2010 to see how many reported these methods to minimize potential bias. Less than 10% did so. By contrast, the journal Infancy, which focuses on human infant behavior, was far more rigorous: Over 80% of its articles reported using methods to avoid bias.
It’s a problem not just confined to my field. A 2015 review of published articles in the life sciences found that blind protocols are uncommon. It also found that studies using blind methods detected smaller differences between the key groups being observed compared to studies that didn’t use blind methods, suggesting potential biases led to more notable results.
In the years after we published our article, it was cited regularly and we wondered if there had been any improvement in the field. So, we recently reviewed 40 articles from each of the same five journals for the year 2020.
We found the rate of papers that reported controlling for bias improved in all five journals, from under 10% in our 2012 article to just over 50% in our new review. These rates of reporting still lag behind the journal Infancy, however, which was 95% in 2020.
All in all, things are looking up, but the animal behavior field can still do better. Practically, with increasingly more portable and affordable audio and video recording technology, it’s getting easier to carry out methods that minimize potential biases. The more the field of animal behavior sticks with these best practices, the stronger the foundation of knowledge and public trust in this science will become.
Todd M. Freeberg, Professor and Associate Head of Psychology, University of Tennessee
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Psychology Faculty Honored with Awards for Diversity Leadership, Advising, Teaching, and Research Excellence
Psychology Faculty Honored with Awards for Diversity Leadership, Advising, Teaching, and Research Excellence
Psychology Faculty Honored with Awards for Diversity Leadership, Advising, Teaching, and Research Excellence
During the 2023 College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Convocation, several faculty in the Department of Psychology were honored for excellence in teaching, advising, research, and outreach.
Kalynn Schulz, Assistant Professor
Diversity Leadership Award
Schulz is a remarkable scholar and educator whose actions on campus, regionally, and nationally, demonstrate an unwavering commitment to increasing academic representation of and support for scholars from historically marginalized groups.
Schulz’s diversity leadership is perhaps best exemplified by her developing and launching a pilot, cross-institutional research training program between the psychology departments at UT Knoxville and the historically Black university Tennessee State University called STARS (Scholarly Trainees Acquiring Research Skills). The program was designed to prepare TSU students for graduate-level research in psychology and support their transition into graduate school.
Schulz energized department-wide involvement of faculty and graduate students as research mentors, academic coaches, and peer mentors. TSU students from the first cohort are now thriving in graduate school.
Caglar Tas, Assistant Professor
Excellence in Teaching Awards: Junior
Tas is an outstanding teacher and mentor who cares deeply about her students’ learning. She has taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, largely focused on research methods, which are some of the most difficult courses for psychology majors.
Tas demonstrates remarkable skill in engaging students and providing opportunities to apply the material learned in her courses. She encourages students to ask questions and actively participate in discussions. Students in her courses describe her as “an amazing professor,” “always accessible,” and “incredibly knowledgeable.” In addition to the courses she teaches, Tas is an extremely sought-after mentor at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her incredible passion about teaching and mentoring truly energizes her students.
Kalynn Schulz, Assistant Professor
Faculty Advising Service Awards
Schulz exemplifies our college’s commitment to outstanding advising, implementing proactive and developmental advising models to build positive working relationships with students in support of their academic and career goals. Schulz is committed to supporting all students, and especially under-represented minority students. Students consistently express gratitude for her care and concern for their personal well-being in course evaluations.
One student noted, “Schulz thinks of the students who tend to be shy and embarrassed to ask questions in class and the students who may not be doing well and openly offers her most undivided attention and support to assure us that she will always be there to help. Schulz is more than a professor, teacher, instructor—she is a life mentor and an inspiration.”
Chris Elledge, Associate Professor
Faculty Academic Outreach Award: Research & Creative Activity
Elledge’s research program is focused on bullied, socially marginalized, and anxious youth in the Knoxville community. He is a highly valued and accomplished associate professor and associate director of clinical training for the clinical psychology PhD program in the Department of Psychology. Elledge has particular interest in developing school-based interventions that can promote or enrich the peer relationships of at-risk youth.
His commitment to serving children and families in the Knoxville community is exceptionally impressive. His Recess VOLs program pairs at-risk children with UT student mentors who visit children twice weekly for two academic semesters. The program has placed approximately 450 UT students with children across 10 Knox County elementary schools, serving approximately 300 youth.
Deborah Welsh, Professor
Distinguished Research Career at UT
Deborah Welsh has been a faculty member in psychology at UT for more than 30 years and has an exceptional record of research scholarship and student research mentorship. Her research program has focused on understanding adolescent and emerging adults’ romantic relationships and their impact on functioning and has been funded by multi-year research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Even while serving for 10 years as head of the psychology department, Welsh remained research active. She is passionate about research mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. Her mentees have had successful careers and received elite postdoctoral fellowships and national awards. In recognition of her research accomplishments, Welsh has received numerous awards from UT Knoxville, including most recently a Chancellor’s Professorship, the 2023 College of Arts and Sciences College Marshal, and the 2023 Extraordinary Service to the University Award.
Lamer and Team Read the Room for Angry Crowd Bias
Lamer and Team Read the Room for Angry Crowd Bias
Lamer and Team Read the Room for Angry Crowd Bias
Sarah Lamer’s research into the psychology of social biases found favor with an international audience this year, earning her a spot on the Association for Psychological Science (APS) roster of Rising Stars for 2024.
The APS is the leading international organization dedicated to advancing scientific psychology across disciplinary and geographic borders. Lamer, assistant professor in the UT Department of Psychology, is proud to be recognized among the top early-career colleagues in her field.
“This acknowledges the importance and rigor of my scientific work as well as the intensive mentorship model I take in my lab,” said Lamer. She works alongside her graduate students Darla Bonagura and Gillian Preston in her Social Perception and Cognition (SPĀC) lab.
“I work closely with my skilled team of graduate and undergraduate mentees to explore important and timely questions about why bias exists, where it originates, and why it is so fluently perpetuated,” she said. “This accolade recognizes the important work that we do as we discover answers to these critical questions.”
One of her research projects, “The Angry Crowd Bias: Social, Cognitive, and Perceptual Mechanisms,” is supported by a National Science Foundation grant that enables her to design, analyze, and conduct studies; mentor graduate students through the research process; share their work at professional conferences; and conduct workshops to share a love of science with students in the local Knoxville community.
The angry crowd bias is a psychological phenomenon people can experience when first exposed to faces that are hard to see or that have subtle expressions—notably among a “many faces in a crowd” situation. People can report that these faces look threatening, even when they are not.
“We know from a bulk of research that people are able to detect average information about a crowd with some accuracy,” said Lamer. “But perception is more complex than that. Accuracy and bias always work together in human perception.”
Lamer and her team hypothesized that this complex mix causes a tendency to perceive an unfamiliar crowd’s mood to be potentially dangerous.
“We focused on anger bias since crowds can pose a stronger threat to safety than an individual,” she said. “If a crowd is angry at you, you are at much higher risk than if an individual is angry at you. In other words, it is functional to be wary of a crowd.”
The team uses state-of-the-art methods and statistical tools to examine a viewer’s visual attention to faces—eye-tracking data, signal-detection methods, and drift-diffusion modeling—to track what people focus on while making emotional judgments. Then they assess what is accurate and what leads to bias.
“The approach makes it possible to track visual patterns—for example, which faces people look at first in a crowd, how long they look at each face, and whether they ignore anyone,” said Lamer. “All of which are likely to be affected by the race and gender of the faces themselves.”
This work is timely in relation to widespread protests in the US over the past several years and the divergent interpretations these crowds have received across public perception—potentially due in part to the racial and gender makeup of these assemblies.
“With this social backdrop in mind—and understanding that, according to event-forecasting models, social unrest is likely to increase in the future—this research was designed to identify the people whom negative crowd biases are most likely to affect, where these biased judgments come from, and how malleable they might be,” said Lamer. “We plan to complete data analysis on our current study by the end of the semester.”
Phillip McGarry Published in ‘The Conversation’
Phillip McGarry Published in ‘The Conversation’
Phillip McGarry Published in ‘The Conversation’
Republicans and Democrats consider each other immoral – even when treated fairly and kindly by the opposition
Both Republicans and Democrats regarded people with opposing political views as less moral than people in their own party, even when their political opposites acted fairly or kindly toward them, according to experiments my colleagues and I recently conducted. Even participants who self-identified as only moderately conservative or liberal made the same harsh moral judgments about those on the other side of the political divide.
Psychology researcher Eli Finkel and his colleagues have suggested that moral judgment plays a major role in political polarization in the United States. My research team wondered if acts demonstrating good moral character could counteract partisan animosity. In other words, would you think more highly of someone who treated you well – regardless of their political leanings?
We decided to conduct an experiment based on game theory and turned to the Ultimatum Game, which researchers developed to study the role of fairness in cooperation. Psychology researcher Hanah Chapman and her colleagues have demonstrated that unfairness in the Ultimatum Game elicits moral disgust, making it a good tool for us to use to study moral judgment in real time.
The Ultimatum Game allowed us to experimentally manipulate whether partisans were treated unfairly, fairly or even kindly by political opponents. Participants had no knowledge about the person they were playing with beyond party affiliation and how they played the game.
In our experiments, even after fair or kind treatment, participants still rated political opponents as less moral. Moreover, this was true even for participants who didn’t consider themselves to have strong political bias.
Other psychology studies suggest that conservatives are more politically extreme, being more likely to adopt right-wing authoritarianism and more sensitive to moral disgust. However, in our experiments, we found no differences in party animosity and moral judgment between liberals and conservatives, suggesting political polarization is a bipartisan phenomenon.
Why it matters
Our experiments illustrate the magnitude of current political polarization in the United States, which has been increasing for at least the last four decades.
Americans with different political opinions could once cooperate and maintain friendships with one another. But as political attitudes begin to coincide with moral convictions, partisans increasingly view each other as immoral.
My colleagues and I are particularly interested in this topic, as we worry about the potential for political polarization based on moral convictions to descend into political violence.
What’s next
My colleagues and I believe that a controlled scientific approach, rather than speculation, could help find ways to mitigate political polarization. Currently, we are running experiments to explore how online interaction – for example, through social media – can foster psychological distance between partisans. We’re also investigating how emotions such as disgust can contribute to the moral component of partisan animosity, and how the evolutionary origins of morality may play a psychological role in political polarization.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Phillip McGarry, Ph.D. Candidate in Experimental Psychology, University of Tennessee
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Garriy Shteynberg Published in ‘The Conversation’
Garriy Shteynberg Published in ‘The Conversation’
Garriy Shteynberg Published in ‘The Conversation’
‘Collective mind’ bridges societal divides − psychology research explores how watching the same thing can bring people together
Only about 1 in 4 Americans said that they had trust in the nation’s institutions in 2023 – with big business (1 in 7), television news (1 in 7) and Congress (1 in 12) scraping the very bottom.
While institutional trust is decreasing, political polarization is increasing. The majority of Republicans (72%) and Democrats (64%) think of each other as more immoral than other Americans – a nearly 30% rise from 2016 to 2022. When compared with similar democracies, the United States has exhibited the largest increase in animus toward the opposing political party over the past 40 years.
When public trust and political consensus disappear, what remains? This question has occupied my research for the past 20 years, both as a scholar trained in social anthropology, organizational science and social cognition and as a professor of psychology.
Researchers don’t have all the answers, but it seems that even in the absence of public trust and agreement, people can share experiences. Whether watching a spelling bee or a football game, “we” still exist if “we” can witness it together.
My colleagues and I call this human capacity to take a collective perspective theory of collective mind. The foundation of collective mind, and what we study in the lab, is shared attention, instances when people experience the world with others.
Shared attention amplifies experiences
Experiments in the laboratory with adults show that shared experiences amplify psychological and behavioral reactions to the world.
My colleagues and I find that compared with attending to the world alone, or at different times than others, synchronous attention with others yields stronger memories, deeper emotions and firmer motivations. Studies show that seeing words together renders them more memorable, watching sad movies together makes them sadder, and focusing together on shared goals increases efforts toward their pursuit. Sharing attention to the behavior of others yields more imitation of that behavior.
Critically, those experiencing something with you need not be physically present. Although in some experiments participants sit side by side, in other studies participants believe they are attending together from different lab rooms or even across the nation. Irrespective of the location, the sense that “we are attending” to something together at the same time – as compared with in solitude or on your own schedule – amplifies the experience.
Laboratories in the United States, Australia, Hungary, Germany and Denmark have found similar results. Notably, some studies have found that people want to have more shared experiences, even when they don’t actually enjoy them more than solitary experiences.
What’s behind these observations? As a social species that survives through joint action, human beings in general need a common baseline from which to act. When shared experiences amplify what we know together, it can guide subsequent behavior, rendering that behavior more understandable and useful to the collective.
Sharing attention builds relationships
Shared attention happens within the bounds of our cherished relationships and groups, like when friends go to a movie together, but also outside of them.
Research suggests that shared attention on a common subjective experience can build relationships across the political divide and strengthen cooperation among strangers. For instance, when people co-witness that they have the same gut reaction to an unfamiliar piece of music or a meaningless inkblot, they like each other more, even if they have opposing political leanings. Critically, relational benefits are more likely when such subjective experiences are shared simultaneously – instances when people are most likely to sense a shared mind.
People can be attending next to one another or thousands of miles apart, in groups of two or 200, and the results are the same – shared attention amplifies experiences, creates social bonds and even synchronizes individuals’ heartbeats and breaths.
Scientists studying kids find that interest in attending with others begins in the first year of human life, predating the development of language and preceding any notion of shared beliefs by several years. Human relationships don’t begin with sharing values; sharing attention comes first.
The role of shared attention in society
Before the advent of the internet, Americans shared attention broadly – they watched the same nightly news together, even if they did not always agree whether it was good or bad. Today, with people’s attention divided into media silos, there are more obstacles than ever to sharing attention with those with whom you disagree.
And yet, even when we can no longer agree on what “we” believe, sharing attention to the basic sights and sounds of our world connects us. These moments can be relatively small, like watching a movie in the theater, or large, like watching the Super Bowl. However, remembering that we are sharing such experiences with Americans of all political persuasions is important.
Consider the Federal Communications Commission’s fairness doctrine, a policy that controversial issues of public importance should receive balanced coverage, exposing audiences to differing views. In effect, it created episodes of shared attention across social, political and economic differences.
Institutional trust is now almost twofold lower than it was in 1987, the year the fairness doctrine was repealed. It is possible that the end of the fairness doctrine helped create a hyperpolarized media, where the norm is sharing attention with those who are ideologically similar.
Of course, sharing attention on divisive issues can be painful. Yet, I believe it may also push us beyond our national fracture and toward a revitalization of public trust.
Why? When we share awareness of the world with others, no matter how distinct our beliefs, we form a community of minds. We are no longer alone. If we are to restore public trust and national ideals, sharing attention across societal divides looks like a way forward.
Garriy Shteynberg, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Tennessee
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