A study shows that Americans are doing a better job of cooperating and have been doing so over a period of time now. But our beliefs about that very thing are in the other direction. We believe that our willingness to cooperate has declined while it's actually increased. This poses a potential problem if we continue to generate perceptions of a lack of pro-sociality, people might become less cooperative.
In this episode we sit down with NYU psychologist Jay Van Bavel who is very good at Twitter. His feed is always overflowing with the absolute latest and greatest research from psychology with links to papers as they come out – on many of the topics we so often explore on this podcast – and in this episode we discuss ten of those tweets and the research he’s shared.