This week, we talk about the halo effect, and other psychological research into attraction. We talk about how people assume attractive people are better than others at everything they do, how opposites don't attract, and how we're all supposed to marry our third cousins according to economists. This was a fun week, thank you for listening!

Some of the things we talk about:

The Halo Effect:

Lucker, G. W., Beane, W. E., & Helmreich, R. L. (1981). The strength of the halo effect in physical attractiveness research. The Journal of Psychology, 107(1), 69-75.

Assortative Mating (opposites don't attract):

Vandenberg, S. G. (1972). Assortative mating, or who marries whom?. Behavior genetics, 2(2-3), 127-157.Chicago

Frieze, I. H., Olson, J. E., & Russell, J. (1991). Attractiveness and income for men and women in management 1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 21(13), 103

https://twitter.com/p05pod

This week, Tom and Guy talk about reward and punishment. Reward and punishment are a big part of our lives and why we decide to do the things that we do. Some people are rewarded by starting businesses, and others by playing Club Penguin. We talk about classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and finally reward and punishment sensitivity and how this relates to the decisions people make.

If you want to test your reward sensitivity, here is a link to a scale that has been validated in empirical studies (lab tests).

https://psytests.org/trait/bisbasen.html

The BAS reward responsiveness figure will tell you your reward sensitivity, and the BIS figure will tell you your punishment sensitivity.

Here are some papers we talk about in the episode:

Palatable food has the same response as addictive drugs:

Montalban, E., Giralt, A., Taing, L., Nakamura, Y., Pelosi, A., Brown, M., ... & Girault, J. A. (2023). Operant training for highly palatable food alters translating mRNA in nucleus accumbens D2 neurons and reveals a modulatory role of Neurochondrin. bioRxiv, 2023-03.

Mindfulness effects on habitual responses:

Chen, X., & Reed, P. (2023). The effect of brief mindfulness training on the micro-structure of human free-operant responding: Mindfulness affects stimulus-driven responding. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 79, 101821.

If you want to get in contact with us, reach out on our twitter: https://twitter.com/p05pod

Thanks for listening!

Prejudice exists between groups of all kinds. This week Tom and Guy talk about one way that psychology has found we might be able to reduce prejudice. We touch on taste aversion, prejudice and contact theory. Here are some of the papers we mention:

Negative versus positive contact:

Barlow, F. K., Paolini, S., Pedersen, A., Hornsey, M. J., Radke, H. R., Harwood, J., ... & Sibley, C. G. (2012). The contact caveat: Negative contact predicts increased prejudice more than positive contact predicts reduced prejudice. Personality and social Psychology bulletin, 38(12), 1629-1643.

Refugee resettlement:

Albrecht, S., & Smerdon, D. (2022). The social capital effects of refugee resettlement on host communities. Economic Record, 98(320), 80-112.

Meta-analysis on contact theory:

Lemmer, G., & Wagner, U. (2015). Can we really reduce ethnic prejudice outside the lab? A meta-analysis of direct and indirect contact interventions. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45(2), 152-168.

To find us on twitter head to: https://twitter.com/Lessthan05.

Thanks for listening!

Sex work is stigmatised globally, and in this episode Tom, Guy and our amazing guest Jade discuss why that might be the case. We touch on sex work broadly, why it is stigmatised, as well as mating strategies and evolutionary psychology.

Papers mentioned:

Butterworth, J., Pearson, S., & von Hippel, W. (2023). Dual mating strategies observed in male clients of female sex workers. Unpublished manuscript. Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, University of Queensland.

McCleary-Gaddy, A. T., & James, D. (2022). Skin tone, life satisfaction, and psychological distress among African Americans: The mediating effect of stigma consciousness. Journal of health psychology, 27(2), 422-431.

More work on dual mating strategies:

Maier, C. T., & Waldbauer, G. P. (1979). Dual mate-seeking strategies in male syrphid flies (Diptera: Syrphidae). Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 72(1), 54-61.

And a book on sex and religion:

Endsjø, D. Ø. (2012). Sex and religion: Teachings and taboos in the history of world faiths. Reaktion Books.

To contact Jade, reach out to j.butterworth.uq.edu.au, and to find us on twitter head to: https://twitter.com/Lessthan05.

Thanks for listening!

In this episode we talk about pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance is where we make an assumption about others' beliefs, and that assumption is wrong. The resources we talk about are:

Men as allies in STEM:

De Souza, L., & Schmader, T. (2022). The misjudgment of men: Does pluralistic ignorance inhibit allyship?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(2), 265.

Pluralistic ignorance and climate change policies:

Sparkman, G., Geiger, N., & Weber, E. U. (2022). Americans experience a false social reality by underestimating popular climate policy support by nearly half. Nature communications, 13(1), 1-9.

Other things we mention:

Conformity studies:

Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological monographs: General and applied, 70(9), 1.

Bad data on MTurk:

Webb, M. A., & Tangney, J. P. (2022). Too Good to Be True: Bots and Bad Data From Mechanical Turk. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17456916221120027.