As 2016 comes to an end, the editors take a look back at the most read posts of the year. Some are quickly becoming classics, while others tackle new research or cover discussions important to the field. Take a look for yourself. 

Tom Stafford

If you were surprised by the result of the Brexit vote in the UK or by the Trump victory in the US, you might live in an echo chamber – a self-reinforcing world of people who share the same opinions as you. Echo chambers are a problem, and not just because it means some people make incorrect predictions about political events. They threaten our democratic conversation, splitting up the common ground of assumption and fact that is needed for diverse people to talk to each other.

By Joshua John Clarkson, Ashley Otto and Edward Hirt

By Janna M. Gottwald

Executive functions are processes that help us to focus on what is important, to remember things, and to plan our daily activities. Finding early markers of executive functioning could help researchers develop interventions for children with impaired executive functioning (Diamond, 2013), but early executive functioning and its emergence in infancy are not yet sufficiently understood.

Dear SPSP community,

By Melissa J. Ferguson, Cornell University and Clayton R. Critcher, University of California, Berkeley

At hundreds of colleges and universities across the country, thousands of students are in the midst of the fall semester, trying to manage the academic tasks of studying, exams, papers and lectures. A lot is riding on their academic performance – earning (or just keeping) scholarships, landing summer internships, gaining employment and of course acquiring new skills and knowledge.

By James A. Russell

Humans everywhere easily read each other’s emotions from their faces – facial expressions of basic emotions are universally recognized -- or so we are told in our textbooks.  A new series of studies raises doubts about this claim.

by Cory Clark

When determining whether someone did something intentionally, should it matter whether the action had positive or negative consequences? Logically, the downstream consequences of an action should be irrelevant to such judgments, but research reveals that U.S. Americans are far more likely to see actions with harmful side-effects as intended than identical actions with helpful ones.[1]

Consider the following example: