
David González
2.7K posts






National identity reconfigures brain responses from “them” to “us” A new paper finds that briefly priming national versus ethnic identity increases ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation for ethnic out-group faces, a pattern typically reserved for self and in-group processing. This helps explain how shared group membership could support efforts to reduce intergroup bias. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… This is very similar to a fMRI study I ran 20 years ago for my PhD Dissertation. Simply assigning people to a mixed-raced team shifts neural responses to focus on shared group membership and away from race (we also found a similar pattern from the ventromedial cortex). journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.111… It's nice to see the same pattern happens for national identity that we have found with more basic shared identities.

"What AI Will Never Do." My new @PsychToday article explores why AI will never be able to do therapy: AI can simulate empathy, and it can simulate therapy. But it doesn't actually do either, as it doesn't understand and it cannot relate 👇 psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-be…


@AnnahBackstrom Good to remind that evidence doesn't suggest phones replace IRL activities or socialization, but mainly displaces television: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…






What happens when we become convinced that being right makes us morally good, and that people who disagree must be morally bad? This week’s piece looks at moral blindspots among people and institutions that perceive themselves to be good. In which I pick on the (in)aptly named Good Law Project.


"in every society for which there are good data—contemporary and historical—living to older ages is not just for a few unusual outliers … modal age at death is consistently around 70, only recently increasing a bit to 80 or so." journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.10…





Research by Kordsmeyer et al using photos of German and Brazilian faces suggests the tendency to infer positive characteristics from attractiveness has a negative counterpart that can be at least as pronounced as positive biases for attractive individuals: buff.ly/fOvHuAK






Young men use moral outrage to claim status in political debates. They are use moral and political discussions to shame others and assert dominance, regardless of their political beliefs. In contrast, both men and women were likely to use moral posturing to build up their reputations within their own groups. psypost.org/young-men-use-…



