A new study has found that after watching a docudrama about the efforts to free a wrongly convicted prisoner on death row, people were more empathetic toward formerly incarcerated people and supportive of criminal justice reform. The research, led by a team of Stanford psychologists, published Oct. 21 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
Lagos is Nigeria’s economic powerhouse, but it has some of the worst slums in the country. Lagos slums are characterised by high levels of poverty – the state of not having enough resources to meet basic needs for living, such as food, water, shelter, healthcare and education. Poverty is multidimensional. It is not only about...
Stories written by the latest version of ChatGPT were nearly as good as those written by human authors, according to new research on the narrative skills of artificial intelligence. But when people were told a story was written by AI — whether the true author was an algorithm or a person — they rated the...
Cellphone chats have become death sentences in the continuing, bloody factional war inside Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel. Cartel gunmen stop youths on the street or in their cars and demand their phones. If they find a contact who’s a member of a rival faction, a chat with a wrong word or a photo with the wrong...
The new study also identifies factors that can make these efforts more successful. When an election result is disputed, people who are skeptical about the outcome may be swayed by figures of authority who come down on one side or the other. Those figures can be independent monitors, political figures, or news organizations. However, these “debunking”...
Climate change has caused an increase in the semi-arid climate region in Brazil. Data from the National Center for Monitoring and Warning of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN) and the National Institute of Space Research (INPE) in the South American country indicate an expansion of 7,500 square kilometers per year since 1990, which is equivalent to five...
I teach a course on New England witchcraft trials, and students always arrive with varying degrees of knowledge of what happened in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Nineteen people accused of witchcraft were executed by hanging, another was pressed to death and at least 150 were imprisoned in conditions that caused the death of at least...
If you work in digital marketing, you don’t need to be told a picture’s worth a thousand words. More than half of content marketers say images are crucial for achieving their social media goals, and a staggering 70% of users prefer image-based posts over text, surveys have found. But which types of visuals work best?...
In recent U.S. elections, results often took days to finalize, fueling voter distrust in the electoral process and ballot outcomes. Now, research from the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at UC San Diego shows that a simple, proactive message from election officials – ahead of Election Night – can effectively reduce this distrust. The...
A psychologist has explained the sources of political beliefs in the U.S., why liberalism and conservatism appeal to different individuals and why we continue to disagree about fundamental issues in American life. Bridging Our Political Divide collects the insights of a psychologist who offers antidotes to the unproductive arguments that now dominate our political culture and...
