psychology

Name: Mario. Age: 28. Profession: Plumber. Ethnicity: White. Anyone who has played a lot of video games knows that the vast majority of characters are white males. However, a team of scientists have conducted the first ever virtual census, putting a number on the ethnicity and sex composition of video game characters, and raising questions about the psychological effects these games might have on members of the underrepresented groups.

While the debate over the legality of waterboarding has raged fiercely since the Bush administration declared that it was not torture, experts have conducted a parallel debate over the effectiveness of torture as a means of interrogation. After all, legality aside -- if it doesn't work, why do it?

Small acts of eco-kindness can make people more likely to cheat and steal.

In a recent paper by a pair of researchers at the University of Toronto, entitled "Do Green Products Make Us Better People?" the answer seems to be, eh, not completely. Although you may have done Mother Earth a favor, your unconscious might sway you to be less ethical with your fellow man.

A chef and a professor are teaming up to create a dining experience that capitalizes on synaesthetic perception that links tastes to certain sounds. Synaesthesia is the association of different sensory perceptions -- hearing shapes or seeing music.

Video games get a bad reputation: they're blamed for adolescent obesity and even accused of inciting violent behavior. But finally some good press comes to the gaming world: the latest research from Nature Neuroscience proves action video games actually improve vision.

That's right: researchers at the University of Rochester discovered that first-person shooter games increase contrast sensitivity, the primary factor used by ophthalmologists to measure eyesight.

Economy got you down? Not sure if this whole “American capitalism” thing is working out for you? Looking for cheap housing? Well, you can always start from ideological scratch and build a new society on a free floating platform in the high seas.

Racial profiling is a moral minefield, pitting safety against equity—one human right against another. But forgotten in the furor is a more important moral (and scientific question) about profiling: Does it actually work?

Witnesses still hold sway in the courtroom, even as the reliability of human memory is called more and more into question. According to the Innocence Project, a legal group devoted to exonerating the wrongly incarcerated, mistaken eyewitnesses account for three quarters of convictions later overturned by DNA evidence. Now two new reports in the journal Psychological Science suggest that eyewitness reports may be even more prone to inaccuracy than previously thought, even when memories are fresh in one's mind, and especially when someone confesses.