News by Subject Social & Behavior

New research from Virtual Joint Statistical Meetings 2020 includes applications to COVID-19, sports, forensic science, AI, social media emoticons, climate change, stock market, criminal justice, undocumented immigrants, algorithmic fairness, US census, precision medicine, opioid crisis, and more. Complementary press registration is available.

Children, and especially boys, show stronger stereotyping about masculine and feminine jobs than previously suspected, an innovative study by the University of Sussex reveals.

Hotels should build an emotional attachment with tourists when communicating during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic if they are to encourage them to return, according to new research. The study finds that crisis communication emphasising shared emotional responses to risks enables tourists to humanise the hotel, which can subsequently create an emotional attachment. This attachment can then increase tourists' intentions to visit once the crisis ends, which is crucial if the industry is to recover.

Your perceptions of someone you just met are influenced in part by what they look like and how they sound. But can you ignore how someone looks or how they sound if you're told it is not relevant? Probably not, at least in most cases, a new study found.

Do you hesitate to speak up when you disagree with the rest of the group? Are the others not saying anything either? Then you're probably not maximizing your collaboration. But you can learn how to disagree more effectively.

Some animals fake their body size by sounding 'bigger' than they actually are. Maxime Garcia from the University of Zurich and Andrea Ravignani from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics studied 164 different mammals and found that animals who lower their voice to sound bigger are often skilled vocalists. Both strategies--sounding bigger and learning sounds--are likely driven by sexual selection, and may play a role in explaining the origins of human speech evolution.

It lacks the drama of a shape-shifting alien creature, but another threat looms over the prospect of generations-long, interstellar space travel: Explorers arriving on Xanadu could face problems communicating with previous and subsequent arrivals, their spoken language having changed in isolation along the way. A new paper looks at the issues.