A contest study to reduce attractiveness-based discrimination in social judgment.

Discrimination in the evaluation of others is a key cause of social inequality around the world. However, relatively little is known about psychological interventions that can be used to prevent biased evaluations. The limited evidence that exists on these strategies is spread across many methods and populations, making it difficult to generate reliable best practices that can be effective across contexts.

Dogs (Canis familiaris) prioritize independent exploration over looking back.

It has been suggested that over the course of domestication, dogs developed the propensity to "look back" or gaze at humans when they encounter a challenging task. Unfortunately, little work to date has addressed the question of why dogs look back. To explore this issue, we conducted 3 experiments in which dogs had the option of doing something other than looking back at their owner when encountering an unsolvable task.

Do Dogs Prefer Helpers in an Infant-Based Social Evaluation Task?

Social evaluative abilities emerge in human infancy, highlighting their importance in shaping our species' early understanding of the social world. Remarkably, infants show social evaluation in relatively abstract contexts: for instance, preferring a wooden shape that helps another shape in a puppet show over a shape that hinders another character (Hamlin et al., 2007).

Social decoys: Leveraging choice architecture to alter social preferences.

Many of society's most significant social decisions are made over sets of individuals: for example, evaluating a collection of job candidates when making a hiring decision. Rational theories of choice dictate that decision makers' preferences between any two options should remain the same irrespective of the number or quality of other options. Yet people's preferences for each option in a choice set shift in predictable ways as function of the available alternatives.

Spontaneous calcium spike activity in embryonic spinal neurons is regulated by developmental expression of the Na+, K+-ATPase beta3 subunit.

Different types and patterns of spontaneous electrical activity drive many aspects of neuronal differentiation. Neurons in the developing Xenopus spinal cord exhibit calcium spikes, which regulate gene transcription and neurotransmitter specification. The ionic currents necessary for spike production have been described.