#cognitivebias — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #cognitivebias, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: August 12, 2026 at 11:45PM
SOURCE: SCIENCE DAILY MIND-BRAIN FEEDTITLE: Why your brain keeps making the same decisions – even when better options exist
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260812015218.htm
Why do we keep making the same choices even when better options are available? Researchers found that simply repeating a decision can reshape what we prefer, causing familiar choices to feel better than alternatives. Instead of weighing every option from scratch, the brain often remembers what it chose before and repeats it. That shortcut may help explain many everyday habits and seemingly irrational decisions.
URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260812015218.htm
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #DecisionMaking #BrainShortcuts #HabitFormation #BehavioralScience #CognitiveBias #DecisionFatigue #PreferenceShift #Neuroscience #RationalVsIrrational #ChoiceArchitecture
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**One problem. One enemy. One solution.**
Simple narratives are comforting. Complexity isn't.
What if our preference for simple answers isn't stupidity, but an evolutionary strategy — one increasingly unsuited to the complex world we've created?
My latest on *Wrong Opinions*: **The Price of Complexity**
https://wrongopinions.com/ideas-and-society/the-price-of-complexity/
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DATE: August 3, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Body dysmorphia is linked to an exaggerated cognitive bias for self-related information
People with body dysmorphic tendencies learn and process self-related information more strongly than information about other people, according to new research. This exaggerated focus on the self extends even to neutral, everyday objects that have nothing to do with physical appearance. The findings, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, provide evidence that a basic bias in how the brain processes self-relevant information might contribute to severe body image preoccupations.
Body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, is a mental health condition characterized by an intense and distressing preoccupation with perceived flaws in physical appearance. Individuals with BDD often spend hours each day focusing on minor or imagined physical anomalies. This behavior tends to severely disrupt their daily lives, relationships, and social functioning.
“We were motivated to understand what underlying information-processing mechanisms may be contributing to the observed symptomatology of body dysmorphic disorder,” said Maria Richards-Brown, a researcher in the Department of Psychosis Studies at King’s College London. “Through understanding where information processing may differ as one exhibits more body dysmorphic symptoms, we can hopefully identify clinical treatment targets.”
To understand how this intense preoccupation develops, psychologists look at how the brain manages and assigns importance to different types of information. In the general population, people naturally display a “self-prioritization effect.”
“In the general population, individuals show a greater prioritization of processing information about themselves, compared to information about their best friend or a stranger,” Richards-Brown explained. “This is a well-known information processing bias.”
This psychological concept suggests that individuals process, learn, and recall information associated with themselves much faster and more accurately than information associated with other people. For example, if a person is asked to associate a random object with themselves and another object with a stranger, they will consistently recognize the self-associated object with greater ease.
Previous models suggest that BDD might emerge from a hyperactive self-attention network in the brain. This heightened internal focus could cause a person to pay excessive attention to self-related cues, magnifying normal bodily signals into intense preoccupations.
The authors of the current paper designed their research to test whether people with higher levels of body dysmorphic symptoms show an inflated version of this standard self-prioritization effect. They wanted to determine if this bias exists even when the information being processed has no connection to physical appearance.
In the first experiment, the scientists recruited 87 female participants through an online platform. The participants ranged in age from 32 to 71 years old. They completed a standard questionnaire used to screen for the presence and severity of BDD symptoms.
Next, participants completed an associative learning task. The researchers asked them to learn specific pairings between three geometric shapes (a triangle, a circle, and a square) and three personal labels (“You,” the first name of their best friend, and “Stranger”). After a brief learning period, the participants viewed a series of shape and label combinations on a screen.
For each trial, participants had a brief window to press a specific keyboard key to indicate whether the pairing on the screen matched the original associations they had learned, or if it was a mismatch. For instance, if they originally learned that a square represented “You,” they might later see a square paired with the word “Stranger,” which would be an incorrect mismatch.
Across the board, participants demonstrated the standard self-prioritization effect. They were more accurate and faster at correctly identifying matches involving the “You” label compared to the “Friend” or “Stranger” labels.
When factoring in the questionnaire scores, the authors found a specific pattern related to body image concerns. Participants with higher BDD symptom scores were more accurate at identifying the self-related pairings compared to the stranger-related pairings. This gap in accuracy between the self and the stranger was wider for those with higher body dysmorphic tendencies than for those with lower scores.
To confirm and expand upon these initial observations, the scientists conducted a second experiment with a new sample. This group included 173 participants, consisting of 135 females and 41 males ranging from 19 to 71 years old. The procedures were largely the same, but the researchers made the matching task slightly more difficult by flashing the shape-label pairings on the screen for a much shorter duration of 250 milliseconds.
In this second experiment, the researchers also administered two additional questionnaires. One measured symptoms of depression, and the other measured general impulsivity. They included these extra measures to control for the possibility that depression or impulsivity might account for any differences in learning speed or accuracy, rather than BDD symptoms.
The second experiment confirmed the exaggerated self-prioritization effect in individuals with higher body dysmorphic scores. In this iteration, participants with elevated BDD symptoms showed greater accuracy in identifying “You” matches compared to “Friend” matches. The reaction time data also revealed a tailored self-bias.
Participants with more BDD symptoms were disproportionately faster at identifying self-related pairings compared to both friend- and stranger-related pairings. The additional questionnaires provided helpful context for these outcomes. The researchers found that the influence of depression and impulsivity on these processing biases was not statistically significant.
These results point to a core cognitive difference in how people with these preoccupations view the world. “In individuals that have more body dysmorphic symptoms, this bias is even greater, indicating that there is an information processing bias underlying the symptomatic presentations of BDD,” Richards-Brown said.
Relying on an online sample from the general population introduces certain constraints. The participants completed a screening questionnaire that measures body dysmorphic tendencies, but they were not formally diagnosed with BDD by a clinician. Applying these findings directly to clinical settings requires testing patients who have received a formal psychiatric diagnosis.
The study also relied on an uneven ratio of male to female participants, primarily due to sampling constraints in the first experiment. Although the available data did not show sex differences in how people processed self-related information, recruiting a more balanced sample in the future would help confirm that these cognitive patterns operate similarly across all demographics.
Future research might explore how these cognitive biases change during therapeutic interventions. Tracking whether the exaggerated self-prioritization effect diminishes as BDD symptoms improve could offer a new way to measure treatment progress. Adapting these simple computer tasks into training exercises might also help individuals practice directing their attention away from the self, offering a potential supplemental treatment for body image distress.
The study, “Exaggerated Self-Referencing in Body Dysmorphic Disorder,” was authored by M. Richards-Brown, S. Castiello de Obeso, R. Dennison, and R. A. Murphy.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #BodyDysmorphia #SelfPrioritization #BDDSymptoms #SelfReferencing #CognitiveBias #MentalHealthResearch #BodyImageDisturbance #SelfProcessing #PsychologyStudy #BDDTreatmentPotential
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Emotional intensity is not evidence for a belief's accuracy. A triggering event activates an automatic thought, which generates an emotional consequence. We often accept the consequence as proof of the belief. The active phase of Disputation collects evidence for and against the belief.
🔗 https://neuroviaxacademy.com/cognitive-restructuring-guide/
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Why do we think we understand the world more than we actually do?
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-illusion-of-explanatory-depth
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49079175
#HackerNews #understanding #bias #cognitivebias #explanatorydepth #illusionofunderstanding #criticalthinking
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I Think You Might Be Fooling Yourself with AI
https://louwrentius.com/i-think-you-might-be-fooling-yourself-with-ai.html
Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021843
#HackerNews #AI #self-awareness #AIethics #techinsights #cognitivebias
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Ministry Proposes Tax on Nostalgia Posts to Save the Environment
The Ministry has proposed a Nostalgia Tax on every "Only 90s kids will understand..." post. The revenue will help data centers survive the endless storage of recycled memories while an official investigation examines whether the good old days were actually good—or just remembered that way. -
DATE: July 22, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Adults with depression show a negative attentional bias, but new research suggests it is highly task-specific
A recent study published in Comprehensive Psychiatry provides evidence that adults experiencing clinical depression tend to process information differently, often paying more attention to negative details in their environment. The research suggests that this attentional shift is real but might depend heavily on the specific mental tasks used to measure it. These findings help scientists better understand how depression affects the mind and point toward potential ways to tailor future treatments.
Major depressive disorder is a common mental health condition characterized by persistent sadness and a loss of interest in daily activities. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists a diminished ability to think or concentrate as one of the core symptoms of a major depressive episode. To understand this specific symptom, psychologists study selective attention. Selective attention is the brain’s fundamental ability to focus on relevant information while filtering out distractions.
The cognitive model of depression suggests that depressive symptoms are maintained by a negative attentional bias. This means a person has a tendency to automatically focus more on depressing or negative information, such as sad faces or pessimistic words. In a healthy brain, selective attention helps a person prioritize goal-relevant stimuli without getting overwhelmed. In a depressed brain, this cognitive system might instead prioritize negative emotional triggers.
The scientific literature on this topic has been mixed. Some past studies have shown a strong negative bias in depressed individuals, but others have shown no significant difference. Other studies suggest depressed people simply lack the positive bias normally seen in healthy individuals. The mixed nature of this past research prompted the current study.
Jessica Hur, a graduate student at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Medical Science, noted that the project began during her undergraduate studies. “This study started as a summer research project during my undergraduate degree, and I am proud of how it has grown into a published systematic review and meta-analysis,” Hur said. “It was genuinely a collaborative effort, and I would encourage readers to check out the full paper as it is open access!”
Hur explained that evolutionary psychology inspired the investigation. “I first became interested in this topic through my earlier research on the analytical rumination hypothesis and evolutionary perspectives on depression, which propose that some depressive symptoms may reflect an adaptive shift in cognitive resources rather than a pure deficit,” Hur said. The analytical rumination hypothesis suggests that depression evolved as a way to help people focus intensely on solving complex, persistent problems.
“That made me curious whether attention itself, and not only rumination, might show a similar pattern in major depressive disorder,” Hur told PsyPost. “Because the literature on selective attention in depression was mixed and had not been comprehensively reviewed in over a decade, we set out to determine whether adults with depression reliably show a negative attentional bias and, if so, under what conditions.”
To answer these questions, the researchers performed a systematic review and a meta-analysis. A systematic review involves collecting all the published studies on a specific topic to look at broad patterns. A meta-analysis uses statistical tools to combine the mathematical data from those studies into one large analysis. The researchers searched major academic databases to find peer-reviewed studies comparing adults with depression to healthy controls.
The authors gathered 87 previous studies that compared adults experiencing a major depressive episode to healthy controls. In total, the combined research included 4,685 participants with depression and 4,206 healthy participants. The average age of the participants was about 36 years old, and nearly 65 percent of them were female. Most studies required participants to have moderate to severe levels of depression.
The researchers focused on studies that used three specific psychological tests. The first was the original color-word Stroop task. This test asks people to name the color of a font when it spells a conflicting color word, testing a person’s ability to block out distractions. The researchers measured the reaction times of the participants to see how much the conflicting information slowed them down.
The second test was the emotional Stroop task. This version is similar to the original test but uses emotionally charged words, like sad or angry words, instead of color names. It tests if negative words cause more interference than neutral words. The third test was the dot-probe task, which involves showing two images side by side on a screen.
In the dot-probe task, usually, one image is a neutral face and the other is an emotional face. These faces appear for just a fraction of a second before a small dot appears in the location of one of the images. This test measures how quickly a person reacts to the dot. If a person reacts faster when the dot appears in the exact spot where the negative face used to be, it suggests their attention was automatically drawn to the negative image.
When looking at the 87 studies as a whole, the researchers found that about 84 percent of them reported differences in selective attention between the depressed and healthy groups. Out of the studies that specifically looked for a negative bias, about 74 percent found that depressed individuals paid more attention to negative stimuli. The depressed participants tended to perform worse on attention tasks in almost every scenario.
The authors then used 19 of those studies to run their detailed statistical meta-analyses. The combined statistics showed that depression was linked to a significant negative bias during the dot-probe task. People with depression were much more likely to have their attention grabbed by negative facial expressions compared to healthy individuals. This specific finding provides evidence that automatic attention might be altered during a depressive episode.
The statistical analysis for the two Stroop tasks did not reach significance. The depressed participants did show a slight numerical trend toward being more distracted by conflicting words and negative words. The researchers calculated ratios of the average reaction times to account for different testing scales. The mathematical evidence was not strong enough to confidently say this difference was not due to chance.
The inconsistency across the different tests stood out to the research team. “The main takeaway is that attention in depression is likely altered, but not in one simple or uniform way,” Hur said. “The result appears to depend heavily on the type of attention being measured and how it is assessed.”
The reliance on specific tests was an unexpected revelation. “The most surprising part was how task-specific the negative attentional bias turned out to be,” Hur said. “It only showed up reliably with the dot-probe task, not the Stroop tasks, even though all three are used somewhat interchangeably in the literature as measures of selective attention.”
This discrepancy indicates a need for better testing tools in the future. “This highlighted the need for more standardized and psychometrically validated measures before firm conclusions can be drawn about how depression affects attention,” Hur explained. Psychometrically validated measures are tests that have been rigorously proven to be reliable and accurate over multiple testing sessions.
The researchers also checked to see if traits like age or depression severity changed the results. They found that age played a specific role in the dot-probe task results. Older adults with depression showed a stronger tendency to focus on negative faces than younger adults with depression. This suggests that aging might increase a person’s sensitivity to emotionally negative cues.
Readers might misinterpret these findings to mean that all individuals with depression process information the exact same way. The study provides evidence that attentional differences exist, but these mental patterns likely vary from person to person. “I want to pre-empt the idea that this confirms people with depression are simply ‘wired’ to fixate on negative things,” Hur said.
Hur noted that the evidence is currently limited to specific scenarios. “Our quantitative evidence for a negative bias was robust for only one task type (dot-probe), and even that finding was based on a small number of studies,” Hur said. “More importantly, I think the field needs to move beyond documenting that this bias exists and start focusing more on why it exists.”
Scientists are actively debating the true nature of this attentional shift. “One open question we highlight in the paper is whether this attentional shift toward negative information is best understood the way it is traditionally framed, as a symptom or nuisance to be corrected, or whether it could reflect something more adaptive, a reallocation of cognitive resources toward processing and resolving a significant problem,” Hur explained.
This alternative view suggests depression might cause people to hyper-focus on threats to help identify and solve environmental problems. “Currently, we cannot distinguish between these two explanations, and I think that is one of the more important next steps for this line of research,” Hur added.
The research team noted several limitations in their own analysis. The number of studies that provided enough specific data for the statistical meta-analysis was quite small. This small sample size makes it difficult to detect subtle patterns in the data. The researchers also used a mathematical formula to standardize the different depression scales used across the original studies, which might have introduced some measurement errors.
Many of the original studies did not provide detailed information about the medications participants were taking. Psychiatric medications can heavily influence a person’s attention and reaction times. Not knowing the exact doses or types of drugs makes it harder to isolate the physical effects of depression itself. Additionally, some studies included participants who also had anxiety disorders, which commonly occur alongside depression but can influence attention in their own ways.
Another issue is that age might be confused with the overall length of a person’s illness. Older adults might have a stronger negative bias simply because they have been dealing with depression for more years and have experienced more depressive episodes. Most of the original studies did not record the age when the participants first developed depression. This missing information makes it impossible to separate the effects of getting older from the effects of having a long-term mental health condition.
The researchers decided to only include dot-probe studies that showed images for exactly half a second. This time frame is known as supraliminal presentation, meaning the image is shown long enough for a person to consciously register it. By only looking at half-second intervals, the researchers might have missed entirely different patterns that happen at much faster or slower speeds.
Moving forward, researchers hope to continue investigating the evolutionary purposes of depression. “Longer term, I am contributing to the design of a randomized controlled trial that further examines evolutionary perspectives on depression, this time testing the iatrogenic hypothesis, the idea that antidepressants may interfere with the brain’s natural homeostatic mechanisms, such that discontinuing them could increase the risk of relapse,” Hur said. The iatrogenic hypothesis explores how medical treatments might accidentally cause unintended side effects or disrupt the body’s natural balance.
This future research will build upon the foundational concepts explored in the current review. “It is a pharmacological extension of the same evolutionary framework that first drew me to this area,” Hur said. “Ultimately, I want to keep testing these evolutionary theories because, if the evidence supports them, they could help reduce stigma surrounding depression. Some depressive symptoms may be evolved responses to adversity rather than simply signs that something in the brain is malfunctioning.”
The study, “Selective attention in adults with major depressive disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis of task-specific differences and negative bias,” was authored by Jessica K. Hur, Natalie C.W. Ho, Marta M. Maslej, Paul W. Andrews, Meryl A. Butters, Bruce Milliken, and Benoit H. Mulsant.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #depression #attentionbias #dotprobe #strop task #emotionalstroop #selectiveattention #mentalhealthresearch #evolutionarypsychology #major depressive disorder #cognitivebias
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DATE: July 20, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: People more naturally synchronize their movements more with strangers of the same age and race
When interacting with someone who shares a similar age or racial background, people tend to naturally coordinate their body movements more smoothly than when speaking with someone from a different background. These physical rhythms often happen without people realizing it, suggesting that shared visible traits provide a foundation for smoother interpersonal connections. This research was recently published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Spontaneous behavioral synchrony refers to the way people unconsciously coordinate their actions, movements, and pacing during a conversation. This phenomenon involves moving at the same time, matching the speed of actions, and blending gestures together smoothly. It looks a bit like a subtle, unchoreographed dance between two conversation partners.
In psychological research, this physical mirroring typically signals rapport, which is the feeling of interpersonal chemistry and closeness between individuals. When two people click, their bodies often reflect that connection by moving in harmony. Scientists wanted to understand what specific factors predict whether this physical coordination will emerge naturally between strangers.
“Much of the existing research asks what happens after people become behaviorally synchronized, for example, whether it leads to greater trust, stronger relationships, or better teamwork,” said Morgan D. Stosic, a research psychologist with KBR at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Stosic, who earned her doctorate in psychology from the University of Maine in 2023, conducted the study independently of her work at NASA. “Much less attention has been given to a more fundamental question: What causes people to become synchronized in the first place?”
Past theories suggest that individuals who perceive themselves as similar to one another might feel more relaxed and experience greater chemistry. Specifically, highly visible characteristics like age and race are some of the first traits people use to gauge similarity. Sharing these traits might reduce initial anxiety and free up mental energy, making it easier for people to focus on their partner and fall into a shared physical rhythm.
“Our goal was to understand whether sharing visible characteristics with another person, specifically age and race, influences how naturally people connect,” Stosic said. “We wanted to better understand whether these shared characteristics shape our social interactions from the very first meeting.”
To test this idea, researchers set up interactions between people who either shared or did not share the same race or age category. The team evaluated three separate studies featuring female participants who interacted in pairs, known as dyads. The authors focused strictly on women to keep gender constant, as women generally show higher rates of spontaneous behavioral coordination than men.
In the first study, 182 university students formed 91 pairs of strangers. These participants completed a collaborative problem-solving task over a video conferencing platform. Some of the pairs shared the same racial background, while others did not.
“We looked at two outcomes: behavioral synchrony, which is the subtle tendency for people’s movements and behaviors to become coordinated in time, and how close and connected people reported feeling after meeting,” Stosic told PsyPost. “To study this, we paired strangers who were either similar or different in age and race and observed how they interacted.”
The scientists recorded the interactions and extracted three separate one-minute video clips from the beginning, middle, and end of the conversations. Trained human coders watched these silent clips and rated the pairs on their simultaneous movements, tempo similarity, and overall smoothness. The researchers also analyzed the same video clips using an automated software program that tracks human body joints to measure simultaneous movement.
After the video task, the participants filled out surveys rating how much rapport they felt with their partner. The authors found that pairs sharing the same race synchronized their behaviors significantly more than pairs from different racial backgrounds. This difference in movement coordination was only detected by the human coders.
The automated software did not register a difference based on race. The computer scores also failed to correlate with the participants’ own ratings of rapport, indicating the software might not be capturing the true essence of interpersonal chemistry. Interestingly, even though the same-race pairs moved more in sync, the participants themselves did not report feeling any difference in rapport compared to the mixed-race pairs.
“One of the most interesting findings was that people didn’t report feeling any closer to someone simply because they were the same age or race,” Stosic said. “However, trained observers rated people who were similar in age and race as moving and interacting in more synchronized ways. This suggests that subtle aspects of our behavior can reflect shared characteristics, even when our conscious or explicitly reported feelings do not.”
The second study moved the interactions into a face-to-face laboratory setting to see if the findings would hold up in person. This study included 88 women who formed 44 pairs, drawing from a pool of younger adults aged 18 to 24 and older adults aged 60 to 90. The pairs sat side-by-side and spent 15 minutes planning a pretend vacation together using a world map and fake money.
Once again, the researchers categorized the pairs based on whether they matched in race or age. They used human coders and the automated software to evaluate short video clips of the interactions, and they collected self-reported rapport surveys. In this smaller sample, the scientists did not find any statistically significant differences in physical coordination or self-reported rapport based on race or age similarities.
To get a better understanding with a larger group, the authors conducted a third study that replicated the face-to-face vacation planning task of the second study. This final group included 182 women making up 91 pairs. They performed the exact same task but for 10 minutes instead of 15.
In this third study, the results showed that same-age pairs synchronized their behaviors significantly more than mixed-age pairs. Just like in the first study, this physical coordination was picked up by human coders rather than the computer software. The effect of racial similarity on physical coordination was not statistically significant in this specific group.
To make sense of the varying results across the three experiments, the researchers pooled all the data together into a combined analysis involving 450 total individuals. By combining the data, they gained enough statistical power to spot broader trends. The combined analysis showed that pairs sharing the same age and pairs sharing the same race both demonstrated significantly higher levels of behavioral synchrony than pairs with mixed backgrounds.
This combined analysis also confirmed that human observers were much better at detecting this coordination than the computer software. The human ratings consistently matched up with the psychological concept of rapport, which provides evidence that the coders were measuring a meaningful social behavior. The automated software failed to relate to rapport at all across the entire dataset.
“One of the biggest surprises was that the computer vision method we tested didn’t perform as well as we expected,” Stosic said. “Traditionally, behavioral synchrony has been measured by trained human observers, but researchers are increasingly turning to computer vision because it can analyze interactions much more quickly.”
The automated tool used in this study only tracked the simultaneous movement of joints, missing the more nuanced aspects of shared tempo and overall smoothness that human observers can perceive. The software might also have struggled to map movements accurately because the videos only showed participants from the waist up.
“In our study, however, the automated approach didn’t accurately capture synchrony in the way we had expected,” Stosic said. “That could have been due to factors like video quality, lighting, or limitations of the software itself. Whatever the reason, it was an important reminder that newer technologies aren’t automatically better, they need to be carefully validated before researchers rely on them to measure complex human behavior.”
Another complex finding is the gap between how the participants behaved and what they reported on their surveys. The combined data confirmed that age and racial similarities had absolutely no impact on how much chemistry the participants claimed to feel on their surveys.
“One important caveat is that people’s self-reported feelings didn’t always match their observable behavior,” Stosic said. “Participants reported feeling similarly close to their partners regardless of age or race, yet trained observers saw greater behavioral synchrony among people who were more similar.”
Stosic noted that this discrepancy does not necessarily mean that either measure is wrong. “Instead, it suggests that human connection is complex,” she said. “How close we feel to someone and how we behave around them may capture different aspects of social interaction.”
People in mixed-race or mixed-age pairs might have intentionally adjusted their survey responses to avoid looking prejudiced. Alternatively, rapport is made up of multiple components, including mutual attention and positivity. People in mixed groups might have compensated for a lack of physical rhythm by smiling more or paying closer attention to their partners.
“While it’s possible that self-reports don’t always perfectly reflect people’s true feelings, it’s equally possible that behavioral synchrony is just one piece of what makes us feel connected to another person,” Stosic said.
One limitation to consider is that the human coders might have harbored unconscious biases, seeing more harmony in pairs who looked similar to one another. To test this, future research could use video filters that obscure the physical identities of the participants, leaving only their outlines visible to the coders. Additionally, the exclusive use of female participants means these findings might not apply to men or mixed-gender groups.
“That’s the direction we’d like to see this research go,” Stosic said. “While our study focused on age and race, there are many other characteristics, both physical and psychological, that may influence whether people naturally ‘click.’ By better understanding what fosters these subtle social connections, we can gain deeper insight into how successful relationships and effective teams develop, whether in everyday life, the workplace, or even high-stakes environments like healthcare and spaceflight.”
The study, “A Multimethod Assessment of Spontaneous Behavioral Synchrony in Race- and Age-Concordant Versus Discordant Dyads,” was authored by Morgan D. Stosic, Adele E. Weaver, Ken Fujiwara, Ishabel M. Vicaria, Derek M. Isaacowitz, and Mollie A. Ruben.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #behavioral Synchrony #socialpsychology #interpersonalconnection #ageracialconcordance #nonverbalcommunication #rapport #bodylanguage #cognitivebias #psychologyresearch #humanobservation
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"Quantifiable risk belongs to the casino, the mortality table, and the actuarial ledger. It describes a world where the outcome of an event is unknown, but historical data exists to support a probability estimate. Because the boundaries of the system are fixed, we can use historical data to calculate numerical odds.
Knightian uncertainty, by contrast, considers the unprecedented. It arises when a situation, like climate change, is so novel or complex that history offers no guide. We are pushing the biosphere far outside its Holocene baseline, entering an environment where the variables themselves are changing, and the models used to project future outcomes break down."
Why We're Blind to Civilizational Collapse
by Sarah Connor
July 8th, 2026https://collapse2050.substack.com/p/why-were-blind-to-civilizational
#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #CollapseAware #polycrisis #DisasterPreparedness #CognitiveBias #LogicalFallacy #SelectiveUpdating #Sociology #HumanPsychology
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Ah, the classic saga of engineers wrestling with their own cognitive inadequacies 🤯. This riveting manifesto reveals the shocking truth that the human brain isn't as mighty as the software it spawns 😱. So grab your glossary and start planning to triage your bounded cognition, because apparently, that's the shape of the system! 🧠💾
https://shapeofthesystem.com/posts/2026/02/03/bounded-cognition #cognitivebias #engineering #mindset #softwaredevelopment #brainpower #mentalhealth #HackerNews #ngated -
When technical defenses improve, attackers don't retreat. They shift investment to the unprotected layer: the human mind.
🔗 https://neuroviaxacademy.com/cognitive-security-mental-immunity/
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The Second Thinking Space
This article explains why I use artificial intelligence not as a substitute for thinking, but as a second thinking space. Based on the idea that complex structures are rarely understood from within a single perspective, AI serves as a means of exploration, pattern recognition, intellectual challenge, and perspective expansion. The goal is not automation, but deeper insight into the hidden structures that shape decisions, organisations, and human behaviour.https://ifabsthill.com/2026/06/19/the-second-thinking-space/
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Intelligence does not create immunity to misinformation. It sometimes changes the packaging. The brain's dual architecture means fast, intuitive judgments operate continuously, while slow analysis is effortful and depletes. Exploitation targets the asymmetry, not the intellect.
🔗 https://neuroviaxacademy.com/cognitive-biases-brain-hardwired-believe-lies/
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A source that controls its own narrative controls nothing. The asymmetry is simple: misinformation builds About pages, author bios, and citations. It does not build independent verification. Fact-checkers leave the page and search the source name across external sites.
🔗 https://neuroviaxacademy.com/lateral-reading-fact-checkers-guide/
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Why ‘Progress’ Is Just Someone Else’s Destination with Better PR
explains how progress is not a neutral term and, in practice, may be a trap.
I also discuss other subtopics. 🐺→🐩= #SadPanda
#philosophy #evolution #progress #wolves #poodles #future #history #adoption #cognitivebias #survivorshipbias #Substack #blok #video #accounting #asymetry #colonialism #gemini #ai #claudeai