A team of researchers has a new paper that looks at how we choose information about an issue when several options are available. The researchers studied the results from 91 past studies (like this one) and found that when we're presented with alternatives, we're two times more likely to select information that supports our pre-existing point of view than information that challenges it.
They also found that people are more resistant to new points of view when it comes to issues that are associated with political, religious, or ethical values. In these cases, "about 70 percent of the time you will choose information that corresponds with your views, versus about 60 percent of the time if the issues are not related to values," says University of Illinois psychologist Dolores Albarracín, who worked on the study.
"For the most part," she adds, "it seems that people tend to stay with their own beliefs and attitudes because changing those might prevent them from living the lives they're living. But it's good news that one out of three times, or close to that, they are willing to seek out the other side."
It comes as little surprise that we tend to seek out opposing viewpoints when it helps us reach a goal or we have to defend our opinions in public. On the other hand, we're less likely to entertain opposing views when we're unsure of our own beliefs than when we're very confident, since choosing information that supports our view helps us validate our opinion and maintain a stable view of the world.
According to the researchers, we appear to be guided by two different motivations—a desire to feel validated and a desire to know the truth—both of which are important. As they explain in their paper:

Trying to answer that question, Tel Aviv University economics professor Anat Bracha and her colleagues invited people to bike for 10 minutes in the gym at MIT. One group biked in public—in the gym's main room—while another group biked in a private room on the third floor. All the bikers earned money for a charitable cause based on the effort they exerted, but the researchers found that "giving was affected by how visible the participation was," says Bracha. "The more public, the greater the image boost, and the greater the contribution." In other words, the recognition we get from others is part of what motivates us to give.
Would things change, the researchers wondered, if they started paying the bikers for their participation? Turns out things did change—but only on the private third floor.
It seems the public bikers worried that the "image boost" they got from exerting themselves would be undermined if observers knew they were gaining personally from trying so hard, and the level of their effort was the same whether they received money or not. "Money and image motivations clashed," says Bracha. Those biking in private, on the other hand, didn't have the same conflict: Without any social judgment to deal with, they biked more miles on average when they were getting paid.
In this economy, Bracha argues, charitable organizations could benefit from really boosting the image of its donors—publicizing their names or recognizing them in some other way. "Charitable giving is a much greater sacrifice now than it was at this time last year," she says. "Budgets are tighter for everyone, so giving is likely to have greater image value."

People with stronger party affiliation and conservative political views are more likely to read media messages that present viewpoints that challenge or contradict their own, according to a new study in the journal Communication Research. “It appears that people with these characteristics are more confident in their views and so they’re more inclined to at least take a quick look at the counterarguments,” notes Ohio State University communication professor Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, who worked on the study. But, she adds, “they’re not looking for insights that might change their mind.”
Overall, Americans spend 36 percent more time reading articles that reinforce their point of view than reading articles that challenge their viewpoint, the researchers found. When we do read articles that challenge our preexisting views, we almost always balance that with reading articles whose messages support our opinions. In general, we don't want our views “to be challenged by seriously considering other viewpoints," Knobloch-Westerwick says.
When volunteers were given five minutes to read an online magazine that had pro and con articles on four hot-button topics (gun ownership, abortion, health-care regulation, and minimum wage), most of them chose to read only articles that agreed with their current beliefs. While some volunteers read articles from both perspectives on an issue, very few people read only articles that challenged their opinions.
What does this mean for the escalating culture war between science and faith? If people choose to read and listen only to messages they already agree with—which often contain rhetoric that's hostile toward the other side— it can make them more extreme in their viewpoints, Knobloch-Westerwick says, and make tolerance and compromise less likely. “Citizens really should be weighing and monitoring diverse arguments in order to make informed decisions," she says. "Unfortunately, that’s not happening as often as it should." —Heather Wax

Believers are better able to deal with stress and their own errors than nonbelievers are, according to a new study in Psychological Science. Researchers, led by University of Toronto psychologist Michael Inzlicht, compared the stress of those who are religious and believe in God and those who don't by measuring their brain activity while they performed a "Stroop task." In this cognitive test, words written in different colors flash in front of the participants, who are asked to say the color of the word rather than read the word itself. For instance, the word on the screen might be "green," but it will be printed in blue—making "blue" the right answer.
While performing the test, religious participants showed significantly less activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain that's involved in controlling attention and self-regulation (Inzlicht describes it as an "alarm bell that rings when an individual has just made a mistake or experiences uncertainty"). The finding suggests that people who are religious or believe in God feel less stressed and anxious when they make mistakes—and in the experiment, they made significantly fewer of them; those with the deepest and strongest religious zeal were the least likely to show activity in the anterior cingulate cortex when they made errors. Religious conviction, the researchers write, "provides a framework for understanding and acting within one's environment" and acts as a "buffer" against anxiety about mistakes or the unknown. Other factors—like personality type, IQ level, and self-esteem—didn't seem to affect the stress test results.
While high levels of anxiety are negative, a certain amount of anxiety is useful for development and self-preservation, says Inzlicht, because it "alerts us when we're making mistakes. If you don't experience anxiety when you make an error, what impetus do you have to change or improve your behavior so you don't make the same mistakes again and again?" —Heather Wax

The majority of people find meaning in their dreams and think they provide hidden truths about themselves and the world around them, according to a new study by Carnegie Mellon University psychologist Carey Morewedge and Michael Norton of the Harvard Business School. The study also found that dreams impact our judgment and behavior—and the way we perceive our dreams is affected by our waking beliefs. For example, we treat pleasant dreams as more significant if they're about someone we like rather than someone we don't like. An unpleasant dream about someone we dislike is believed to be more meaningful than if it were about someone we like.
According to Morewedge, "people attribute meaning to dreams when it corresponds with their pre-existing beliefs and desires. This was also the case in another experiment which demonstrated that people who believe in God were likely to consider any dream in which God spoke to them to be meaningful; agnostics, however, considered dreams in which God spoke to be more meaningful when God commanded them to take a pleasant vacation than when God commanded them to engage in self-sacrifice."
The research appears in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. —Heather Wax

A new study shows that electrical changes in the heart caused by anger or other kinds of mental stress can lead to future arrhythmias and sudden cardiac arrest in patients with implantable cardioverter defibrillators. (An ICD is a pacemaker-like device that monitors and maintains heart rhythm and also sends small shocks of electricity to stabilize an abnormal heartbeat; thousands of Americans have one, including former Vice President Dick Cheney.)
About three months after their ICDs were implanted, patients were asked to think about a recent situation in which they were angry or aggravated, and researchers analyzed the patients' T-wave alternans (TWA), a measure of the heart's electrical instability.
Strong emotions like anger increase sympathetic arousal, the authors explain, which influences TWA. In the study, led by Dr. Rachel Lampert, a professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, patients with higher anger-induced levels of TWA were more likely to later experience arrhythmias and receive shocks from their defibrillators; in fact, the risk of life-threatening arrhythmias was up to 10 times greater. "Emotion can precipitate ventricular arrhythmias," the researchers write, "and these findings suggest that emotion-induced increases in repolarization instability may link psychological stress to sudden death."
Lampert says more research is needed, "but these data suggest that therapies focused on helping patients deal with anger and other negative emotions may help reduce arrhythmias and, therefore, sudden cardiac death in certain patients."
The research will be published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. —Heather Wax

Teenagers feel some obligation to put aside their own desires to help their parents (even when their parents' needs are small), according to a new study led by University of Rochester psychologist Judith Smetana. The study found that both parents and teens (in this case, seventh and tenth graders) try to balance and coordinate requests for help with their own desires, taking into account who is asking for the help and how much help is needed. When the needs are low, parents are more likely than teenagers to think it's OK for teens to say no to requests for help and satisfy their own desires instead.
When needs are big, parents of tenth graders are more likely than the parents of seventh graders to think it's selfish to fulfill personal desires rather than help. On the other hand, tenth graders are less likely than seventh graders to think teens are selfish for not helping. "In other words, parents' and teens' ratings of selfishness became increasingly divergent with age," the researchers write. "This difference between parents' and adolescents' ratings may be linked to the increases in the intensity of adolescent-parent conflict found at this age." —Heather Wax

Emphasizing the commonalities between two religious or ethnic groups will help create harmony between the groups, but it also might lead to greater social inequality, according to new research by a group of psychologists led by Tamar Saguy of Yale University. The researchers found that when two groups—one more advantaged than the other—focus on their similarities, the disadvantaged social group develops better attitudes toward the advantaged group and a greater belief that the advantaged group will act fairly when it comes to things like distributing resources. In other words, the disadvantaged group begins to focus less attention on the differences in power between the two groups. This group becomes overly optimistic, the researchers write—and "such optimism may relax support for social action." Yet, they find, the new expectations "prove unrealistic when compared against the actions of members of the advantaged group."
After testing their theory in the lab, the researchers surveyed Israeli-Arabs (a disadvantaged minority group) and found that those who had more Jewish friends had better attitudes toward Jews (the majority group) and were more likely to think Jews were fair to Arabs. These Israeli-Arabs also showed less attention to social inequality and relaxed support for social change (though their motivation for change remained generally high).
According to the researchers, "positive intergroup contact and intergroup harmony do not necessarily undermine efforts toward inequality," but "encounters that emphasize both common connections and the problem of unjust group inequalities may promote intergroup understanding as well as recognition of the need for change. Such mixed-content encounters, through which common humanity and morality are likely to be emphasized, can both bring members of advantaged and disadvantaged groups together and perhaps motivate them to eliminate social inequalities." —Heather Wax

More than half of teenagers—54 percent—mention high-risk behaviors on their MySpace pages, according to a new study from the Seattle Children's Research Institute that appears in the January issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Researchers, led by Dr. Megan Moreno (now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Dr. Dimitri Christakis, looked at 500 randomly chosen profiles written by 18-year-olds and found that 41 percent referenced substance abuse, 24 percent referenced sexual behavior, and 14 referenced violence. Yet, the study also found that profiles that mentioned church or religious involvement—as well as profiles that indicated participation in sports or hobbies–were less likely than the others to mention the risky behaviors. —Heather Wax

According to new research by Jesse Preston, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, our unconscious attitudes toward science and God can be manipulated, and these attitudes appear to be in automatic opposition to each other when it comes to answering the ultimate questions of reality (like the origin of life or how the universe began). In other words, when science is shown to provide valuable explanations of various phenomena, most people show a preference for science and a neutral or negative attitude toward God; when people use God as an ultimate explanation, they display more positive associations with God and a more negative attitude toward science.
"What is really intriguing is that the larger effect happens on the opposite belief," says Preston. "When God isn't being used to explain much, people have a positive attitude toward science. But when God is being used to account for many events—especially ... life, the universe, free will, these big questions—then somehow science loses its value." On the other hand, she adds, "people may have a generally positive view of science until it fails to explain the important questions. Then belief in God may be boosted to fill in the gap."
The study, which Preston conducted with Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, appears in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. —Heather Wax

Religious beliefs produce various reactions in childhood sexual abuse victims, according to Jean-Guy Nadeau, a professor of theology and religious sciences at the Université de Montréal. Nadeau interviewed women who were abused as children and found that those who had a strong religious upringing often felt terrible guilt about their abuse and believed they'd go to hell if they didn't forgive their abusers. “A child’s God can be kidnapped and exploited by an adult, often by the very adult who taught the child about God in the first place,” says Nadeau. “It’s the victims, not the aggressors, who find themselves silenced and overwhelmed by guilt, pain, and isolation.”
Some kids, says Nadeau, stop believing in a God that doesn't protect children, others pray their abuse will end, and others recite prayers to fortify themselves during the ordeal and foster resilience. —Heather Wax

Most research shows religious participation can help teens battle depression because their involvement provides them with a support system and sense of belonging. But a new study in the journal Review of Religious Research shows this positive effect doesn't hold true for everyone: For adolescents from certain races, as well as females from all races, high levels of worship and involvement in their religious institutions can make them more depressed.
According to the study, white and black teenagers who report high levels of religious participation also report low levels of depression, but Latino and Asian-American teens who are highly active in their church have more symptoms of depression than do their peers of the same race.
“Asian and Latino youth who are highly involved in a culturally distinct church may have a more difficult time balancing the beliefs of their family and their traditional culture with mainstream society. Their religious institution is telling them what should be important in their lives and how to behave, and mainstream society is saying something else," study co-author Richard Petts, a sociologist at Ball State University, said in a press release.
When it comes to teenagers who go to church at least once a week, Asian-Americans report 20 to 27 percent more symptoms of depression than do whites and blacks, while Latinos report 6 to 14 percent higher rates of depression. But Latino teens who never attend church also report high levels of depression, rates 26 to 28 percent higher than white and black teenagers. Within their groups, Asian-Americans who never go to religious services and Latinos who show a mid-range level of involvement with their religion were the least likely to be depressed. “Participating to a certain extent may enable these youth to balance their lives better," says Petts. "They have a connection with a religious community and all the benefits it offers, but they are not so immersed that they’re out of touch with mainstream society. So they’re sort of getting the best of both worlds."
Female adolescents, he says, also often experience a tension between the culture and traditions of their religion and those of society. Higher levels of depression in females, he believes, come from the fact that women often have subordinate status in religious institutions and may "feel that they don't have equal say." Notably, female teens who are sexually active report higher levels of depression than sexually active males do—an example, Petts thinks, of the emotional stress that can result when religious dictates and personal decisions compete and conflict.
Still, says Petts, who conducted the study with Anne Jolliff when they were both doctoral students at Ohio State University, race and gender "are not the only two factors that may be contributing to higher and lower depression among youth." We need to, he says, "consider the broader social aspects of institutions such as religion on an individual's well being, both good and bad." —Heather Wax

The rapid disappearance of vultures in South Asia is having a dramatic effect on the burial rituals of the area's Parsis, who follow the Zoroastrian faith, especially those in India. Parsis have relied on the vultures to dispose of the remains of the dead for more than 2,500 years. Their religion forbids both burial and cremation, which are viewed as polluting the sacred elements of the natural world, but without the vultures to complete the cycle of life, the bodies are beginning to pile up, causing many Parsis to worry about the fates of their loves ones' souls.
Hindus, who are forbidden to touch deceased cattle, and Muslims, who can't handle deceased animals not used in sacrifice, are also feeling the effects of the dwindling vulture population as carcasses begin to line the country. More disturbing are the large numbers of wild dogs and rats, which are thriving in the absence of vultures and could act as carriers for epidemic diseases. Scientists have isolated the cause of the rapid decline—a pharmaceutical drug called diclofenac that has been heavily used to treat both livestock and humans throughout the region—and taken steps to return the vulture population to its previous numbers. —Stephen Mapes