Carrying children, groceries, and water across varying terrain: Changes in gait and comfortable walking speed.

Background: Carrying items of substantial weight and value in one's arms while traversing challenging terrain is a common task that requires considerable care. Carrying valuable (e.g.

Lifting, tasting, and carrying: The interaction of magnitude and valence effects in time perception.

Magnitude effects (e.g., heavier or faster is longer) and valence effects (e.

We agree and we disagree, which is exactly what most people do most of the time.

Humans are continually diverging and converging with respect to each other. Research across many domains suggests that differentiation and integration are aspects of a more complex set of dynamics, and are not step-wise but interdependent and continuous. Research on conformity in particular reveals that divergence and dissent are forms of cooperation, reflecting concerns for both individual and group integrity.

Rethinking conformity and imitation: divergence, convergence, and social understanding.

Social and developmental psychologists have stressed the pervasiveness and strength of humans' tendencies to conform and to imitate, and social anthropologists have argued that these tendencies are crucial to the formation of cultures. Research from four domains is reviewed and elaborated to show that divergence is also pervasive and potent, and it is interwoven with convergence in a complex set of dynamics that is often unnoticed or minimized. First, classic research in social conformity is reinterpreted in terms of truth, trust, and social solidarity, revealing that dissent is its most salient feature.

Speaking from ignorance: not agreeing with others we believe are correct.

Values-pragmatics theory (Hodges & Geyer, 2006) predicts that people will sometimes disagree with others they believe are correct, for reasons similar to those explaining agreement with incorrect answers in an Asch (1956) situation. In 3 experiments, we found evidence that people in a position of ignorance sometimes do not agree with the correct answers of others in positions of knowledge. Experiments 1a and 1b found this speaking-from-ignorance (SFI) effect occurred 27% of the time.

Looking up to others: Social status, Chinese honorifics, and spatial attention.

Two experiments were carried out to investigate whether social status encoded in Chinese honorifics has metaphorical effects on up-down spatial orientation. In Experiment 1, participants judged whether a word was an elevating or denigrating term immediately prior to judging whether an arrow was pointing up or down. Arrow orientation was identified faster when its direction was congruent with the perceived social status of the preceding honorific (e.

The weight of time: affordances for an integrated magnitude system.

In five experiments we explored the effects of weight on time in different action contexts to test the hypothesis that an integrated magnitude system is tuned to affordances. Larger magnitudes generally seem longer; however, Lu and colleagues (2009) found that if numbers were presented as weights in a range heavy enough to affect lifting, the "larger seems longer" effect was enhanced, but it was eliminated with weights too light to affect lifting. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that actually lifting kilogram and gram weights had effects parallel to symbolized weights, suggesting that Lu et al.

New Affordances for Language: Distributed, Dynamical, and Dialogical Resources.

In introducing the articles of this special issue on language, which grew out of the conference "Grounding Language in Perception and (Inter) Action," we take the opportunity to reflect on fundamental aspects of speaking and listening to others that are often overlooked. The act of conversing is marked by context sensitivity, interdependency, impredicativity, irreversibility, and responsibility, among other things. Language entails real work: it involves real movements in physical, social, and moral orders that are distributed across a wide array of spatial-temporal scales (e.

A nonconformist account of the Asch experiments: values, pragmatics, and moral dilemmas.

This article offers a new approach to Asch's (1956) influential studies relating physical and social perception. Drawing on research on values, conversational pragmatics, cross-cultural comparisons, and negotiation, the authors challenge the normative assumptions that have led psychologists to interpret the studies in terms of conformity. A values-pragmatics account is offered that suggests that participants attempt to realize multiple values (e.