Social psychology. Just think: the challenges of the disengaged mind.

In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.

"Show me the money": vulnerability to gambling moderates the attractiveness of money versus suspense.

Do people take risks to obtain rewards or experience suspense? We hypothesized that people vulnerable to gambling are motivated more by the allure of winning money whereas people less vulnerable to gambling are motivated more by the allure of suspense. Consistent with this hypothesis, participants with high scores on a subscale of the Gambling Attitudes and Beliefs Survey--a measure of vulnerability to gambling--reported more of a motivation to earn money (pilot study), were more likely to accept a certain or near-certain amount of money than to gamble for that same amount (Studies 1-2), and worked harder to earn money (Study 3). People vulnerable to gambling also made more accurate predictions about how much they would gamble. People less vulnerable to gambling, in contrast, gambled more than people vulnerable to gambling, but did not know that they would.

Cumulative and career-stage citation impact of social-personality psychology programs and their members.

Number of citations and the h-index are popular metrics for indexing scientific impact. These, and other existing metrics, are strongly related to scientists' seniority. This article introduces complementary indicators that are unrelated to the number of years since PhD. To illustrate cumulative and career-stage approaches for assessing the scientific impact across a discipline, citations for 611 scientists from 97 U.S. and Canadian social psychology programs are amassed and analyzed. Results provide benchmarks for evaluating impact across the career span in psychology and other disciplines with similar citation patterns. Career-stage indicators provide a very different perspective on individual and program impact than cumulative impact, and may predict emerging scientists and programs. Comparing social groups, Whites and men had higher impact than non-Whites and women, respectively. However, average differences in career stage accounted for most of the difference for both groups.