Portal:Psychology

Cognitive inertia is the tendency – for a particular orientation in an individual's thinking about a matter, belief, or strategy – to resist change. Clinical and neuroscientific literature often describes it as a lack of motivation to generate cognitive processes needed to attend to a matter or problem.

The physics term "inertia" emphasizes resistance to change in a mode of cognitive processing that has been used for a substantial time. Commonly confused with belief perseverance, cognitive inertia is perseverance in an interpretation of information, not perseverance in the belief itself. (Full article...)

• "Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin." — Ivan Pavlov

Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt (born May 29, 1965) is an American social psychologist who is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. Eberhardt has been responsible for major contributions on investigating the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime through methods such as field studies and laboratory studies. She has also contributed to research on unconscious bias, including demonstrating how racial imagery and judgment affect culture and society within the domain of social justice. The results from her work have contributed to training law enforcement officers and state agencies to better their judgments through implicit bias training. She has also provided directions for future research in this domain and brought attention to mistreatment in communities due to biases.

Eberhardt has authored Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, was a recipient of the 2014 MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship, been named one of Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers, and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (Full article...)

• ... that a study of people who reported experiences of alien abduction found that many exhibited characteristics consistent with fantasy-prone personality?
• ... that Fortnite's Tilted Towers was described by critics as the equivalent of "psychological torture" and being "dropped into a meat grinder"?
• ... that Pan Shu had to write psychological theory in secret during the Cultural Revolution?
• ... that bereavement support groups are one of the most common services offered for grief but have little evidence of improving psychological outcomes?
• ... that although Andrzej Żuławski's film Possession is referred to as a psychological drama and horror, its genre is still a matter of controversy?
• ... that diverse fields study the mind, including psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy?