Kidnapping a person for ransom or taking a hostage for political reasons is not a new practice. Between the 12th and 16th centuries, Muslims and Christians living in the Mediterranean region frequently captured each other during religious conflicts. Because so many people were held captive, administrative procedures and laws were instituted to govern captive exchanges, and a network of agents was formed to negotiate for the release of captives.
Much previous research on trust has treated factors relating to trust as universal, ignoring the important cultural differences that prompt people from certain backgrounds to trust while others distrust. For instance, studies show Japanese people are less likely than Americans to exhibit a general trust in strangers, largely because of the value that the Japanese place on reputation.
In everyday interactions, people face the difficult decision of whether to trust others. But how do we decide whom to trust? How can we leave others with the impression that we deserve their trust?
Technological advances have created computers that can aid people in making decisions in areas as simple as driving directions and as complex as diagnosing disease. These applications have the potential to improve our lives substantially, but research has shown that they are infrequently used. Why is this? Do people mistrust computers? Is there real reason to be more confident in human decision-making than in computers?
As part of an effort to encourage the development of behavioral economics in Europe, the University of Toulouse in France will hold its first Summer Institute on Economics and Psychology from June 16-24, 2005. The institute is designed based on the Summer Institute in Behavioral Economics run by the Behavioral Economics Roundtable every two years for U.S.-based researchers. The Toulouse Institute will include 30-35 participants, about half of whom will come from European universities and the other half from North America.
In her 2006 Russell Sage book, To Be an Immigrant, Kay Deaux examined ethnic identification and found that it often indicates the extent to which an immigrant has become acculturated to a new country or maintains identification with the country of origin. For example, though race plays a limited role in the West Indies, it becomes more relevant to migrants once they arrive in the United States, where they are primarily identified by others as black, rather than Guyanese or Jamaican.
In February 2008, the Russell Sage Foundation approved a Visiting Scholar working group to study the malleability of intelligence comprising William Dickens (University of Maryland); James Flynn (University of Otago, New Zealand); and Richard Nisbett (University of Michigan). This working group will develop a model of the way in which the environment affects the growth of intelligence and use it to examine the reasons for the historical improvement of IQ scores over the last sixty years.
In a series of psychological experiments, supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, Claude Steele of Stanford University identified the phenomenon of "stereotype threat": a person’s fear of confirming a stereotype, even if they do not believe that stereotype, can impair their performance, thereby confirming the very stereotype they wanted to avoid.