In Intro Psych, when discussing superordinate goals—which are really just ways of creating new ingroups-I would tell my students that one way we could get world peace would be, ironically, to be attacked by invaders from outer space.

Data centers

While we are not currently under such attack, residents of some smaller communities feel like they are under attack by those who want to build data centers near their towns (gifted article) (Tavernise, 2026). The residents are worried about traffic, the impact on endangered animals, noise pollution, higher electric bills, damage to the environment, and decreased home values. “But it was the sheer scale of the proposals, the suddenness with which they’ve appeared and the secrecy surrounding them that is punching emotion into the issue, turning out thousands of Democrats and Republicans for tense town hall meetings around the state” (Tavernise, 2026).

Residents who have been on opposite sides of the political divide in the U.S. are finding themselves working together on a superordinate goal: to stop the building of a data center in their community. And, in the process, they have discovered that they have much more in common. One Republican said of Democrats, “We’ve been foes for a long time, but when it comes down to our backyards, we realized we are really just the same people” (Tavernise, 2026).

Politics

Meanwhile, in Iowa, Rob Sand is running for governor. Sand identifies as a Democrat, but he is working hard in his campaign to downplay the Democrat/Republican divide to focus voters’ attention on being united on making Iowa better (gifted article) (Bosman, 2026).

At town halls across the state, Mr. Sand makes a point of asking audience members which party they belong to, applauding each political party and then asking the crowd to sing “America the Beautiful” together. Then he talks about the woes of the state and how his experience as state auditor and as an assistant attorney general who worked on white-collar-crime cases can help solve them (Bosman, 2026).

By asking attendees to identify their political parties, Sand is acknowledging that there are different political leanings in the room—and that everyone in attendance can see that, too. By applauding each, he ensures everyone feels welcome. But the brilliant move is asking everyone to sing “America the Beautiful.” The subtext: before we get started, let’s all agree on this one thing.

I don’t know if Sand will win the Iowa governor’s race, but I give him a lot of credit for trying to build bridges instead of more walls. I bet I’m not the only one in the U.S. who is tired of the walls.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

I recently read Henry Grabar’s book Paved paradise: How parking explains the world. I highly recommend it. For this post, one story stands out. In the 1980s, Sam Schwartz, a former cab driver, became New York City’s Traffic Commissioner (Grabar, 2024). His goal was to find ways to keep traffic moving. In fact, he’s the person who coined the term gridlock to describe what happens when traffic stops moving. An easy way to bring traffic to a halt is when vehicles park in the traffic lanes, commonly called double-parking.

Diplomats have diplomatic immunity. “Diplomatic immunity is a principle of international law by which certain foreign government officials are not subject to the jurisdiction of local courts and other authorities for both their official and, to a large extent, their personal activities”(United States Department of State: Office of Foreign Missions, 2018, p. 2). In the case of a serious offense, the country in question may waive immunity and allow their diplomat to be prosecuted by U.S. law enforcement. The only other alternative is expulsion from the U.S.

A parking ticket, however, does not rise to that level of offense. “Between March and October 1977, representatives of the Soviet Union in New York received more than 6,500 parking tickets” (Grabar, 2024, p. 42). And they were not the only diplomats parking wherever they wanted. With diplomatic immunity, they did not need to pay the parking fines. There was no disincentive to park illegally. If there were no open parking spaces near their consulate, they would just double-park.

Sam Schwartz, the NYC Traffic Commissioner, had had enough. While he couldn’t do anything about the parking fines, he could do something else to disincentivize illegal parking. “[H]e told his tow trucks it was open season on diplomats’ DPL [license] plates” (Grabar, 2024). The end result? “Traffic on the east Midtown streets flowed again; the west-side tow pound, stuffed with Mercedes and Jaguars and BMWs, began to resemble the parking lot of a country club” (Grabar, 2024, p. 43).

As you might imagine, this caused quite an uproar among the diplomatic corps.

Schwartz was summoned to the [United Nations] General Assembly to answer for his aggressive towing policies—prompting a rare moment of international harmony. “The Israelis and the Arabs were getting along; Iran and Iraq, which were then at war, were offering each other coffee. All united in attacking me,” he recalled. “If someone were taking a tour of the UN at that moment, he might think I had the answer for world peace.” Such was the rapt attention in the room (Grabar, 2024, p. 43).

While Schwartz was not an invader from outer space, he was someone who all nations came together to work against.

In the end, the U.S. Senate passed legislation which allowed the city to tow diplomats’ cars and instructed the State Department to deduct the unpaid fines from U.S. government aid. Parking violations plummeted” (Grabar, 2024, p. 43). And without the parking wars to unite them, the nations of the world resumed their previous states of disagreement.

Hacky sack is back.

Suddenly, teenagers all over the U.S. are playing hacky sack (again). Why? It seems to have started with TikTok, but that doesn’t completely explain the appeal. One teenager interviewed for a New York Times story said, “It’s kind of bringing everybody together” (gifted article) (Holtermann, 2026). I think he’s onto something. Hacky sack is a cooperative game. It’s an opportunity for people to come together and share in a moment, to just be part of a group with a common goal, where there are no winners or losers.

References

Bosman, J. (2026, May 8). Democratic gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand is worrying Iowa Republicans. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/us/rob-sand-iowa-governor-democrat.html

Grabar, H. (2024). Paved paradise: How parking explains the world. Penguin Press.

Holtermann, C. (2026, May 12). Hacky Sack Mounts a Comeback With Gen Z. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/style/hacky-sack-gen-z.html

Tavernise, S. (2026, May 1). ‘The most bipartisan issue since beer’: Opposition to data centers. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/us/politics/liberals-conservatives-data-centers.html

United States Department of State: Office of Foreign Missions. (2018, August). Diplomatic and consular immunity: Guidance for law enforcement and judicial authorities. https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2018-DipConImm_v5_Web.pdf

I’ve been asked by several colleagues for my thoughts on the future of higher education in the age of AI, especially asynchronous courses.

First, as things now are, there is no way to ensure that any assessment completed by students outside the closely-monitored classroom was written by the student. Even before AI, that was the case. For example, I have had students hire others to complete their assignments. AI just makes this kind of cheating available to everyone. Although students who pay for AI may get a higher quality of writing.

Do you believe you can accurately detect AI-written text? There is a new Google Chrome extension that will make AI-generated text sound more human (Iovine, 2026). Sinceerly will get rid of the AI tells, such as commonly-used AI phrases and the em-dash (in almost every conversation I’ve had about this, someone will defend their use of em-dashes; I, too, am an em-dash fan, and I am very human). Since “too err is human,” Sinceerly will add in some typos. (If they’re intentional, are they still typos?) And that’s why Sinceerly is spelled incorrectly. Sinceerly works in your Gmail compose window according to one of three levels you choose: subtle, human, or CEO. Okay, I kind of love that CEO is different from human. And this isn’t the only tool like this out there. The most popular AI tools can be instructed to rewrite their own generated text in a different style, such as something more typical of a college freshman. The user might have to request the typos, though.

Earlier this month, Advait Paliwal created a bot called Einstein (gifted article) (Shroff, 2026). All a student had to do was give Einstein their Canvas username and password, and Einstein would monitor Canvas for new assignments and then complete them. The Atlantic journalist enrolled in a free Intro to Stats class to give Einstein a spin. The journalist aced the course. Or, more accurately, Einstein aced the course. Paliwal insists that he created Einstein to be provocative, to show what is happening right now and what is to come. Paliwal took Einstein down “after he received multiple cease-and-desist letters, including one from Canvas’s parent company” (Shroff, 2026). Paliwal is right. He was just the messenger. “The latest bots have massive context windows, meaning that students can feed in mountains of course content such as syllabi, lecture slides, and practice exams. Today’s agentic tools can complete all kinds of tasks, such as participating in online discussion forums and taking notes on recorded lectures without student intervention” (Shroff, 2026).

What about oral exams? While it’s more labor intensive, some online instructors are meeting with students online using tools like Zoom. When an instructor asks a student an oral question, instructors believe the response is the student’s response. Maybe it is. aiApply’s app, Interview Buddy, is one of several tools available to job interviewees for real-time help. “Our AI tool offers instant answers to interview questions, providing immediate guidance even for unexpected questions” (AI Interview Answer Buddy – Real-Time Interview Assistance, 2026). It’s not difficult to imagine a tool where a student could give AI access to recorded lectures and the textbook (ebook or scanned pdfs), and the AI tool would listen to the instructor’s oral exam questions and generate an answer in real time. In fact, Google’s Notebook LLM might be able to do that right now. Certainly a student could enter all of those data sources into Notebook LLM. The challenge would be running the audio from Zoom (or similar) into the chat box, but that doesn’t seem like an unsurmountable problem. Even if the student knew that they were going to have screen share, they could meet with their instructor using the Zoom app on their phone and have their laptop set up on their desk right behind the phone.  

I’ve spoken with many instructors who have given up on trying to outwit AI and its users. Instead, they say, “The students who want to learn will learn. Those who don’t will use AI.” The big problem with this thinking is that the value of the degree is plummeting. If those who are not interested in learning are using AI to do their work, they will walk away with a grade that does not reflect what they learned in the course. If students use AI in all of their courses, their 4.0 GPA is meaningless, as their new employer will soon learn, assuming this newly minted graduate uses Interview Buddy to fool an employer into hiring them. 

Instructors have used assignments, quizzes, and exams to encourage even the most uninterested students to learn course content and develop important skills. Extrinsic motivation at its best. You complete this work to a satisfactory level, and I’ll give you points. Now, the most uninterested students have found a way to complete the work without actually doing any work, yet they still receive the points.

Scott K. Johnson, an Earth science instructor, “overheard some college students talking about their classes. One was complaining about an assignment they needed to do that night, and another incredulously asked why they wouldn’t just have ChatGPT do it. The first replied, ‘This is my major, I actually need to learn stuff in this class. I use AI for my other classes.’ (Johnson, 2026).

“I actually need to learn stuff in this class”. For the students who want to learn—for those who have intrinsic motivation to learn—they will work to learn. Let’s make our assignments and quizzes optional. Truly optional. No points attached. The students who want to use those assignments and quizzes as tools to learn will complete them. Those who just want the points will not. (There would likely be a few who would do these optional activities just to look good to their instructor—a different kind of extrinsic motivation: impression management.) Instructors would be able to spend more time giving feedback to the students who want to learn—and who would be more likely attend to and use the feedback. [See all of those em-dashes? That’s me, not AI.]

There is one big issue remaining, however. At the end of the term, instructors still need to record grades for all of their enrolled students.

The only solution I can see is a return to well-proctored, in-person, paper-and-pencil exams. This is easy for multiple-choice questions. Instructors of a certain age will need to dust off their knowledge of old-school cheating techniques, such as detecting writing on the back of a soda bottle label. For handwritten essays, blue books started their resurgence in the 2024-2025 academic year (Bereny, 2025). One colleague who has returned to in-class written exams has noticed that the handwriting of today’s students is atrocious. That’s unsurprising given how little practice they get at handwriting. An alternative is a computer classroom where the computers are not connected to the Internet, as one college has done. Essays are typed, printed in the room, and handed to the instructor. The student’s course grade is determined solely by these exams. Students who do the optional assignments and quizzes, though, are expected to do better on the exams because they will have, ostensibly, better learned the material or, perhaps, those students study more because they are intrinsically motivated. It’s an empirical question.

For face-to-face classes, returning to in-person exams is not a big lift. But what about online courses? Higher education accrediting bodies are going to start asking—or should start asking—administrators and faculty what they are doing to protect the integrity of their online degrees. When colleges and universities first introduced distance learning (raise your hand if you remember correspondence courses), students in those courses sometimes had to take in-person exams delivered by an approved proctor. For example, students in the Army could ask their sergeant to be their proctor. In the AI era, students could come to campus and take their exam in a testing center. (Colleges and universities would have to devote funding to expand testing center capacity.) For most students who live locally, coming to campus might not be too much of a burden. For students who have difficulty coming to campus (for reasons such as distance, disability, or caring for someone in the home), proctors (employees of the institution or contractors) could be sent to them. New Mexico State University (NMSU) is in Las Cruces, which is in the southernmost part of the state. Some of NMSU’s students live in the northwest corner of the state, in communities like Shiprock, Gallup, and Farmington, each of which is a 5- or 6-hour drive away. NMSU could partner with local colleges or public libraries to provide proctoring services to their students in those communities.

We cannot put the AI genie back in the bottle. We’ve returned to vinyl LPs (which I get), cassettes (which I don’t get), film in cameras (which I kind of get), and print books (which I also get). It’s time to return to proctored exams while also fostering intrinsic motivation to learn.

References

AI Interview Answer Buddy – real-time interview assistance. (2026). aiApply. https://aiapply.co/interview-answer-buddy

Bereny, A. (2025, November 6). Blue books are back: The revival of pen and paper exams. The Daily Cardinal. https://www.dailycardinal.com/article/2025/11/blue-books-are-back-the-revival-of-pen-and-paper-exams

Iovine, A. (2026, April 25). Sinceerly is an AI tool to “un-AI” your writing. Mashable. https://mashable.com/article/sinceerly-ai-tool-to-undo-ai-writing

Johnson, S. K. (2026, April 13). To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain. Ars Technica. https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/to-teach-in-the-time-of-chatgpt-is-to-know-pain/

Shroff, L. (2026, April 10). Is schoolwork optional now? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/04/ai-agents-school-education/686754/

On January 18, 2025, dating partners Thomas P. and Kerstin G. went mountain climbing on Austria’s highest mountain, the Grossglockner. Kerstin never returned (Bell, 2026).

Thomas was an experienced climber. Kerstin had some experience but not enough for the winter conditions that included strong winds (45 mph, 74 kph) and below freezing temperatures (17F, -8C).

Prosecutors say the couple got stuck on the mountain and that Thomas P failed to call the police and did not send any distress signals when a police helicopter flew overhead at around 22:30.

Video footage from the helicopter showed the couple still climbing. The judge noted that no distress signals were sent.

The defence argued that at that point Thomas P and girlfriend still felt fine and did not call for help as they were close to the summit.

Webcam images show lights from their torches as they scaled the mountain.

But shortly afterwards, the defence said the situation changed dramatically, when Kerstin G became exhausted close to the summit.

The defence said that she told Thomas P to go to get help.

At 00:35 on 19 January, he called the mountain police. The content of the conversation is disputed. Rescuers said it wasn’t an emergency call but the lawyer says he denies telling police that everything was fine.

He scaled the summit and descended on the other side, leaving Kerstin G behind. Prosecutors say he left her at 02:00 (Bell, 2026).

The mountain rescue team found Kerstin hanging upside down, dead from hypothermia.

Was this an alpine divorce (Britt, 2026)? Alpine divorce is a glib term to mean that a spouse or dating partner kills their mate in the wilderness in such a way that the murderer has plausible deniability.

We’ll never know what happened on that mountain, however,

The court also heard from Andrea B, a former girlfriend of Thomas P, who described how he had left her alone on a previous tour on the Grossglockner in 2023.

She said she had been at the end of her tether, feeling dizzy and her headlight had gone out.

She said she was crying and screaming when he suddenly disappeared, walking ahead and leaving her behind (Bell, 2026).

Andrea’s testimony apparently had little impact on the judge. Thomas was found to be simply negligent; as the more experienced climber, he should have known better. He received a suspended sentence of five months and a fine of €9,600 (approximately $11,000 USD) (Bell, 2026).

Class discussion

After covering relationships, share with students the gender-neutral power and control wheel (Snider, 2021). Ask students to work in small groups to identify the slices of the wheel that apply when a partner threatens to leave their mate alone in an unsafe place, such as the wilderness, or actually does so. Students may disagree on the elements of the wheel that apply, and that’s fine. The goal is for students to become familiar with the elements of the wheel, not to find the right answers.

Before closing the discussion, give students an opportunity to share ideas for how to decrease the chances of being the victim of an alpine divorce.

References

Bell, B. (2026, February 20). Austrian climber found guilty after girlfriend froze to death on mountain. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0k1xkllknmo

Britt, T. (2026, March 14). What is “alpine divorce”? The term, explained. Mashable. https://mashable.com/article/alpine-divorce-term-explained

Snider, J. (2021, June). Gender-Neutral-Power-and-Control-Wheel. https://ecr.umbc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/609/2021/06/Gender-Neutral-Power-and-Control-Wheel.pdf

After covering the Big Five and/or the HEXACO personality traits in Intro Psych, ask your students which trait or traits are most likely to correlate positively with credit score and which trait or traits are most likely to correlate negatively. (If you want to play along, take your guesses now. The answers are in the next paragraph. As a quick reminder, your choices are conscientiousness, openness, extraversion, emotional stability, and agreeableness.)

One study found a small positive correlation between credit scores and conscientiousness. It was about the same size as the positive correlation between credit scores and educational attainment. Interestingly, the authors found small negative correlations between credit scores and the traits of agreeableness and openness (Bernerth et al., 2012). Give students an opportunity to discuss why these correlations might be.

The authors caution, “Although the five-factor model of personality is a powerful predictor of a vast array of individual outcomes, it accounted for less than 15% of the total variance in one’s credit score, raising the question of what else might act as an antecedent to credit scores” (Bernerth et al., 2012, p. 475). Give students an opportunity to share other things that can affect credit scores besides personality traits. Two factors the authors identify based on the literature are life events and financial literacy (Bernerth et al., 2012).

A new dating site is coming—or rather, it is coming back. In its first launch in 2024, Score limited itself to users with good credit scores. In this new iteration, the standard tier is open to all. With the verified tier, though, users can “verify their identity and credit score through Equifax for access to advanced features such as priority visibility, nearby member discovery, saved profile notifications, and early messaging privileges. The verification process uses a soft pull with no impact on credit.” (Score Dating App, 2026).

Ask your students if they would like to know the credit score of a potential dating partner. And, similarly, would they want a potential dating partner to know their credit score. Why or why not?

While knowing a potential partner’s financial health could be useful, it is not a great proxy for conscientiousness. If I were looking for a potential partner (full disclosure: I am not!), that’s what I would want to know. In one study, researchers found that “partner conscientiousness predicted future job satisfaction, income, and likelihood of promotion, even after accounting for participants’ conscientiousness” (Solomon & Jackson, 2014, p. 2189; emphasis mine). Invite your students to generate ideas as to why our partner’s level of conscientiousness is so important to our own success.

The authors report, “This benefit does not arise from partners doing their spouses’ work; rather, it is due to partners creating conditions that allow their spouses to work more effectively. These effects emerge when partners manage more household  responsibilities, enabling their spouses to preserve time and energy for work (outsourcing), when spouses adopt their partners’ pragmatic behaviors (emulation), and when spouses are able to focus on work because fewer relationship problems drain their personal resources (relationship satisfaction)” (Solomon & Jackson, 2014, p. 2195).

Because our measure of conscientiousness is self-report, it may not be the best option for a dating app. The pressure of social desirability is bad enough in psychology labs. I cannot imagine what that pressure would be when filling out a questionnaire on a dating app. Invite students to consider other objective measures that could correlate strongly enough with conscientiousness to act as a proxy measure for a dating app. If you are helping students to be better users of AI, work with them on developing good prompts; consider using the academic search option in Perplexity. Then, review the sources AI referenced. If your students generate potential correlates that are not found in the literature, discuss how a study could be designed to test those ideas. 

References

Bernerth, J. B., Taylor, S. G., Walker, H. J., & Whitman, D. S. (2012). An empirical investigation of dispositional antecedents and performance-related outcomes of credit scores. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(2), 469–478. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026055

Score Dating App. (2026, February 13). Score dating app official press release | February 2026 relaunch. Score Dating App. https://scoredating.app/press-release

Solomon, B. C., & Jackson, J. J. (2014). The long reach of one’s spouse: Spouses’ personality influences occupational success. Psychological Science, 25(12), 2189–2198. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614551370

Wilmot’s Warehouse is a cooperative board game created by someone who was paying attention during coverage of the memory chapter in their Intro Psych course. (Their Amazon page has much more information about the game.)

The game’s premise is simple. Flip over tiles to see an abstract image. Place the tile upside down on the board (representing a warehouse) so that the image is hidden. After all the tiles have been placed, each player gets a bunch of new image tiles that may or may not match the ones face down on the board. The goal is to match the new tiles with the hidden ones. As quickly as possible!  

The memorization happens as the original image tiles are being added to the board. When a player turns over an image tile, all the players must decide what the object is. Is it a crescent moon, a half-eaten cookie, a croissant, or a diaper? Once the decision is made, the tile is placed upside down in the middle of the board. The next tile in the stack is flipped to reveal its image. Let’s say it is an image of three circles. Again, the players must decide what the three circles represent. Three donuts? Three eyeballs? Three oranges? Once the group decides, they then must decide where they are going to place it on the board. It must be placed upside down in an empty spot adjacent to the first tile.

As tiles are added to the board, it will be harder and harder to remember which tile is where. A mnemonic is needed! The game developers recommend the linking technique, where players make a story out of the items. A diaper is placed over the head of the creature with three eyeballs, for example. For additional help remembering this, place the eyeball tile in a space directly below the diaper so that the diaper is “over” the eyes.

I would also give the loci technique a try. Mentally place the items in the room where the game is being played so that the items pictured in the room match their placement on the board. For example, mentally put the first tile—the diaper—on the table where the game is being played. Place the second tile—the three eyes—to the right of the first tile. Picture the player sitting on that side of the table with three eyes.

To add to game difficulty, periodically an “idea” card is thrown into the mix. Sometimes the warehouse’s management gets an idea, and the workers—er, players—must execute the idea. For example, the next several cards must be placed on the outer edges of the warehouse—er, board. 

This 7-minute video provides an excellent overview of the game. The game developers say that the game is for 2 to 6+ players. It really seems like the + in 6+ is quite true. While you could have a class of 35 playing the game, I’d try it in the following way—after covering mnemonics, of course!

Randomly select six students to be the players. They are the ones who are making the decisions about what the objects are and how they are connected in a story (linking) or in the room (loci). The observers should be memorizing right along with the players. Just be sure that the board is visible to everyone. After all of the tiles have been placed and it is time to match, randomly choose six observers to do the matching. Remember, the game is cooperative, so discussion is permitted, encouraged even. Use the game rules to determine the class score. What’s the prize? Extra credit points—more points for higher scores? Swag? Some instructors gather pens and other swag at conferences for just such events. More swag for higher scores? Stickers? Higher scores get more desirable stickers.

The game developers estimate 30 minutes per game. If you don’t want to take the time to play this during class, it could be a fun activity for a psychology club/Psi Chi/Psi Beta/Psi Alpha meeting. If you had a couple of these games on hand, teams could compete for highest score. Or you could challenge all teams to reach a particular score.

If you decide to play, let me know how it goes!

Earlier this month, I attended the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology (NITOP) in what I hope will be their new conference home at the Grand Hotel Golf Resort & Spa in Point Clear, Alabama. It’s a relaxing location with excellent food and friendly staff.

The three keynotes at NITOP 2026 (Lisa Diamond, Claude Steele, and Markus Brauer)  gave me a lot to think about, as NITOP keynotes usually do.

Lisa Diamond is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. Her talk was titled “Your textbook is out of date: What we know now about gender and sexuality, and how to teach it.”

For her classes, she encourages her students to think about the research on gender and sexuality as a researcher does. How do we operationally define these concepts? How do we measure them?

Diamond shared some fascinating Gallup data (Jones, 2025).

[Graph is posted with permission per the requirements of Gallup’s use policy.]

A whopping 23% of Gen Z participants—almost a quarter of your traditional-age students—in this 14,000-person survey of U.S. adults said they identified as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or something else” (Jones, 2025).

One reason for higher LGBTQ+ identification among younger generations of adults is that they are much more likely to consider themselves bisexual than are older people. In fact, more than half of Gen Z (59%) and millennial (52%) LGBTQ+ people are bisexual. That drops to 44% among LGBTQ+ people in Generation X, and is less than 20% among baby boomers (19%) and Silent Generation (11%) LGBTQ+ adults. Older LGBTQ+ people are most likely to identify as gay or lesbian (Jones, 2025).

I wonder if survey participants are selecting “bisexual,” because, of the options given, it is the closest to their experience even though it doesn’t quite capture it.

Let’s consider a term that the Gallup survey did not use: heteroflexible. If you’re not familiar, this article written by a sociology professor a quarter century ago will explain it to you in a lighthearted way (Essig, 2000). That highly esteemed resource for all things cultural, the Urban Dictionary, defines heteroflexible as “An inbetween [sic] between bisexual and straight. A person who is mainly straight but does sometimes find the same gender appealing” (Bieber, 2015).

If we travel back in time 50 years, the survey options may have been simply homosexual or heterosexual. Or maybe even gay/lesbian or straight. I remember having classroom discussions in the 90s about identity, behavior, and attraction. Those three do not always align. For example, let’s take a man who regularly dates women but once or twice a month has sex with men. Decades ago, when presented with the survey options of gay or straight, he likely would have chosen straight. Years later, researchers added bisexual as option. Given the option of gay, straight, or bisexual, our guy would probably still have chosen straight since most of his sexuality was expressed with women. He doesn’t want a long-term relationship with a man, just sex every so often.

Meanwhile, beginning some time in the late 90s, social norms began to shift. Same-sex sexual experiences became more acceptable. I remember meeting the occasional woman who said she had been a “college lesbian.” Such women identified themselves as heterosexual. They had same-sex sexual experiences in college, but not since. In 2008, Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl topped the pop music charts. You know a behavior has gone mainstream when it’s the topic of a pop music hit. Of course, we should acknowledge that same-sex behavior between women has always been a bit more acceptable than same-sex behavior between men. To my knowledge, no major male music pop star has performed a song that could be titled I Kissed a Guy.

Let’s return to the Gallup survey. People in the earlier generations settled long ago into their identities. Yes, identities can change, but it’s harder to change one’s identity than it is to establish an identity in the first place. Let’s take our guy who dates women but occasionally has sex with men. If he is a member of the Silent Generation (born in 1945 or earlier), a Baby Boomer (1946-1964), or a member of Generation X (1965-1980), he is most likely to identify as straight. If he is a Millennial (1981-1996)—who would have been between 12 and 27 when Katy Perry’s song was released—or a member of Generation Z (1997-2006), “straight” may feel disingenuous. With generational social norms being more accepting of same-sex sexual behavior, it’s likely easier to say that one is not straight. But if not straight, what?  

Let’s go back to this Gallup statement: “In fact, more than half of Gen Z (59%) and millennial (52%) LGBTQ+ people are bisexual” (Jones, 2025). [Quick comment. My researcher brain would have preferred this sentence to say… ‘people identify as bisexual’ rather than ‘people are bisexual.’ We don’t know how people really ‘are.’ We only know how they identify.] Anyway, I wish I had access to the questions Gallup actually asked because I want to know the wording of the follow-up question that generated the bisexual data. If “straight” doesn’t fit, then what is the best option of the remaining choices? “Bisexual,” it seems.

 I wonder how many of those Gen Z’ers and Millennials would have chosen “heteroflexible” if it had been an option.  

The lesson for students: Researchers are influenced by time and place, as we all are. The questions researchers ask influence the answers they receive.

References

Bieber, C. (2015, November 10). Urban Dictionary: Heteroflexible. Urban Dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=heteroflexible

Essig, L. (2000, November 16). Heteroflexibility. Salon. https://www.salon.com/2000/11/15/heteroflexibility

Jones, J. M. (2025, February 20). LGBTQ+ identification in U.S. rises to 9.3%. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/656708/lgbtq-identification-rises.aspx

It must have been in my first year of full-time teaching. I was sitting in the faculty break room feeling nervous about seeing my student evaluations of teaching when I heard from down the hall, “I found it!” My colleague Larry came into the break room holding a piece of paper in the air. Gamely, I asked, “What did you find?” A negative evaluation. He found a negative evaluation. One of his core teaching goals was to challenge his students to think differently. He didn’t ask students to adopt his view of the world, but he did want them to see the world from different perspectives. As we all know, seeing the world through different lenses can be deeply unsettling. Some students embrace that experience. Others? Not so much. If Larry did not get at least one evaluation from a student railing against said experience, he did not feel like he was doing his job.

And just as Larry did with his students, he—albeit, inadvertently—encouraged me to look at course evaluations from a different perspective. My experience of looking through a different lens, though, was not deeply unsettling. It was deeply liberating.

I had taught for a few years, first as a grad student and then as an adjunct before landing my first full-time job. I had enough experience with course evaluations to be familiar with the negativity bias, although I didn’t know the term at the time. As Roy Baumeister and colleagues noted, “The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes” (Baumeister et al., 2001, p. 323). That one negative evaluation stands out amongst a sea of glowing evaluations.

Part of my ruminations over that one (or two or three) negative course evaluations was that I could not address the student’s (or students’) issues, concerns, or outright complaints. The evaluations are anonymous, and the course is over. What’s an instructor left to do but ruminate?

Here are a few strategies.

1. Remember the negativity bias. Even if you can’t take your focus off the negative entirely, naming the bias for what it is may help mitigate its impact.
2. Take some time to focus on just the positives. What did your students especially appreciate about your teaching? Your students learned something in your course. How did you help them do that? Write down these major themes and post them in your office where you can easily see them. Glance at them often. Remind yourself that you are having a positive impact.
3. For each of the negative comments, decide if they are valid. If so, is there something you can learn from them? Write down the lessons learned and how you plan to address them next term. For example, I had a course evaluation very early in my teaching career, back when the only option an instructor had was to write on a blackboard. The student wrote on an evaluation (paraphrasing!), “She should write more than just the outline on the board. When it came time to study for the test, all I had was the outline.” I spent a lot of time thinking about that one. What finally shook me out of my rumination was the realization that this student didn’t know how to take notes. I had assumed that all college students knew how to take notes. Since they clearly don’t, I had to build the teaching of note-taking skills into my course.
4. Consider doing mid-term evaluations next term. Even if you don’t know who made what comment, you can address any themes with the class during that term. For example, if a few students think your course requires too much work, what may need to change is student expectations of workload, not the workload itself. You can walk your students through an explanation of Carnegie units. If it helps, I explained them in this blog post (Frantz, 2017). Next, take your students through the Course Workload Estimator 2.0 as it applies to your course. At minimum, your students will see that you are thoughtful about the work you are asking them to do. And, of course, if you discover that the work in your course is much higher than warranted, adjust the workload.

That is one of the great joys (and curses) of teaching. We have the opportunity for a next-term redemption right up until the last class we ever teach.

But please remember that it is not your job to make every student happy. It can’t be done anyway. Some of your students are there just for a decent grade on their transcript. They’re not especially interested in learning. For them, no coursework and an automatic A is what would make them happy. But also in your class are students who want to learn. For them, no coursework and an automatic A would make them deeply unhappy.

Accept that you will always have some negative student evaluations of teaching. And don’t let the negativity bias keep you awake at night.

References

Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is Stronger than Good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323

Frantz, S. (2017). How much work is in your course? https://community.macmillan.com/community/the-psychology-community/blog/2017/12/28/how-much-work-is-in-your-course

Like everybody else, I’ve been thinking about AI. I use Google NotebookLM to pull information from a finite set of documents. I use Perplexity to answer questions I used to ask of search engines. For example, I use macros with some of my spreadsheets. Where I used to search for code and reconfigure it for my specific situation, I can tell Perplexity (or a host of other AI tools) what I want the code to do, and it generates the code for me. Very handy. No question.

When my affiliate university (New Mexico State University) offered me a free Grammarly account, I was willing to give it a try. I appreciated the comma help Grammarly provided, but, more problematically, it also wanted to change my words. It wanted to remove the color from my writing, replacing my idiosyncratic voice with soulless corporate-speak. A tool that was supposed to be a helpful adjunct to my writing became the Borg that kept trying to turn me into someone that sounded just like everyone else it had already taken over. I had to fight to keep my voice. I did the only reasonable thing: I uninstalled Grammarly.

Side note #1: I still needed comma help, so I installed the free LanguageTool for Windows instead. They also have a Borg version that will encourage you to sound like, well, Grammarly, but you have to pay extra for that service.  

Side note #2: If you are unfamiliar with the Borg, this Perplexity summary will help. If AI is our version of the Borg, then my asking Perplexity for a summary is ironic.

I have a colleague who has been sending me email replies that have been written by AI. Her voice has been replaced with this generic, Borg-like corporate-speak. In some circles, such language is called “professional.” To me, reading such emails is like shaking hands with a dead fish. They leave me feeling cold and slimy. And dismissed. Nothing says “I don’t value you and what you have to say” faster than a Borg-generated reply. Truthfully, I’d prefer no reply at all.

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published the obituary for David Bellos, a renowned translator of books (Risen, 2025). When he was asked if he thought AI would remove the need for human translation, he said, “Machines may produce an accurate translation of words, but they could never make the subtle choices among hundreds of possibilities that go into rendering an accurate, nuanced meaning.”

This is the nature of human writing. We make “subtle choices among hundreds of possibilities.” AI writing tools encourage us to all make the same choices. Every time we accept the AI version in our own writing, another little piece of us is erased. Our individual voices are gradually being scrubbed away. We are being assimilated into the Borg.

And the Borg is not just coming for your writing voice. You can now use tools like Cluely to listen in on your conversations, including virtual meetings, job interviews, and oral exams. When you are asked a question, Cluely will provide you with a response that you can read off your screen. “The assumption behind Cluely is that letting an AI pull a Cyrano yields better interactions than relying on your own brain” (Beck, 2025).

Side note #3: If a person resides in an all-party consent-to-record state, they need to get the consent of all parties before using a tool like Cluely or other meeting recorder, such as Otter.ai. How long until we get our first instance of criminal charges or a civil suit being brought against a student during an oral exam or an applicant during a job interview where the student or interviewee used Cluely to answer questions while one or both parties were in an all-party consent-to-record state?

A few years ago, I read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. While it is indeed a very good book, I learned that novels about the dystopian future aren’t for me. As more of our colleagues and more of our students cede their voices to the Borg, I feel like the dystopian future is closing in. An actual dystopian future is not for me, either.

While the Borg insists that resistance is futile, it is not. We do not have to be assimilated. Resistance begins with using our own voices. 

References

Beck, J. (2025, November 18). How to cheat at conversation. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2025/11/cluely-ai-cheat-everything/684913/

Risen, C. (2025, November 20). David Bellos, 80, dies; wrestled French wordplay into English. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/books/david-bellos-dead.html

This is the eighth in a series of posts based on Becca Levy’s book Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live.

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Ageism is alive and well.

In Breaking the Age Code (Levy, 2022), I learned that some K-12 schools celebrate the 100^th day of school by inviting students to dress up as a 100-year-old person. Because, you know, if you’re going to teach age stereotypes, you should make it fun.

Show students these costume ideas on the School Run Messy Bun website (Becker, 2023). Working in small groups, ask students to identify the ageist beliefs they see in the costumes. Ask volunteers from each group to share what they found.

Being this far into Breaking the Age Code (see my other blog posts based on Levy’s book), I’ve learned how our age beliefs can affect how we age. I wasn’t surprised that our beliefs affect us, but I was quite surprised at the size of the effect. It’s easy to think there’s no harm in kids playing dress-up. Until you realize that you are further instilling in them ageist beliefs that could harm them in a multitude of ways as they themselves age. Never mind how they may spread those same ageist beliefs to others.  

If there is a child in your life who attends a school that has such a dress-up day, here are some additional costume ideas.

• Wear a parachute. Just a couple of months ago, Jimmy Hernandez celebrated his 100^th birthday by going skydiving (Felts, 2025).
• Wear F1 racing gear. To celebrate her 100^th birthday, Manette Baillie drove a Ferrari around Silverstone, home to the British Grand Prix (thank you to Drive to Survive for expanding my knowledge of the F1 circuit). She hit 130mph (209 km/h) (BBC, 2022). And how did I find this story? It was a link from a story about how she went skydiving to celebrate her 102^nd birthday (Cunningham, 2024)
• Wear a bungee jumping harness. S.L. Potter celebrated his 100^th birthday by bungee jumping for the first time. From a 210-foot tower (Granberry, 1993).
• Wear running gear. At the age of 100, Fauja Singh completed the 2003 Toronto Waterfront Marathon. He started running when he was 89 (Buendía-Romero et al., 2025). And then there is Lester Wright, who ran the 100-meter dash at the age of 100 in 26.34 seconds (OlympicTalk, 2022).
• Wear cycling gear. At the age of 105, Robert Marchard set the 60-minute cycling record for distance covered on a bicycle in the 105 and older age group: 22.547km (Tremblay, 2017). Granted, he is the only person in that category.
• Wear a swimsuit. At the age of 100, Bill Lambert went scuba diving. He started scuba diving when he was 98 (Gillespie, 2020).

Invite your students to find other stories of people over the age of, say, 90 who are living life to the fullest. They can even use their favorite AI tool to help them search. Work with your students on crafting effective prompts and researching the sources.

References

BBC. (2022, July 27). Woman races Ferrari at Silverstone as 100th birthday approaches. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-northamptonshire-62309918

Becker, A. M. (2023, November 7). 12+ Adorable 100th Day of School Old Lady Costume Ideas To Recreate! School Run Messy Bun. https://schoolrunmessybun.com/100th-day-of-school-old-lady-costume/

Buendía-Romero, Á., Higueras-Liébana, E., Alegre, L. M., Ara, I., & Valenzuela, P. L. (2025). Centenarian athletes: The paradigm of healthy longevity? The Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging, 29(10), 100665. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jnha.2025.100665

Cunningham, A. (2024, August 25). Woman, 102, becomes Britain’s oldest skydiver. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0n431gddlo

Felts, C. (2025, September 2). WWII veteran celebrates his 100th birthday by skydiving with his son and grandson. Capradio. https://www.capradio.org/210335

Gillespie, A. (2020, September 11). 100-year-old becomes world’s oldest diver. Scuba Diving. https://www.scubadiving.com/100-year-old-becomes-worlds-oldest-diver

Granberry, M. (1993, October 14). Free fall at 100: Age doesn’t slow S. L. Potter, who bungee jumps from 210 feet. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-10-14-mn-45507-story.html

Levy, B. (2022). Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live (First edition). William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

OlympicTalk. (2022, May 2). 100-year-old breaks 100m record at Penn Relays. NBC Sports. https://www.nbcsports.com/olympics/news/100-year-old-race-penn-relays-meters-lester-wright

Tremblay, P. (2017, January 4). 105-year-old cyclist sets hour record covering 22.547 km. Canadian Cycling Magazine. https://cyclingmagazine.ca/sections/news/105-year-old-cyclist-sets-hour-record-covering-22-547-km/

For my books, my wife reads every chapter I write before I send it to my editor. We’ve been together for over 25 years. I’ve had occasion to mention a little something every so often about psychology. Let’s just say that she has learned a lot of psychology. Occasionally, she will ask me some version of this: “What’s that thing called where [perfect description of that thing]?” And then I’ll name the thing, e.g., counterfactual thinking, variable ratio schedule of reinforcement, source amnesia. However, sometimes I struggle to come up with the term. I know that I know it. I’ve taught the dang concept for 30 years, of course, I know it, but I can’t, in the moment, get the right neurons to fire. My nonconscious brain keeps working on it while I move on to other tasks, like sleeping. At 3 am, my brain spits it out. Thanks. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for my brain’s work, it’s just that 12 hours earlier would have been a bit better.

Psychology instructors love our vocabulary. We love it so much that often the bulk of our multiple-choice exams is about vocabulary. Here’s a definition; which term does it match? Here’s an example; which term does it match?

I first started wrestling with this as I watched my students design perfectly good experiments while answering an essay question, but then mix up the naming of the independent variable and dependent variable.

Since about 95% of our Intro Psych students are not going to major in psychology, which is more important? Their ability to design a good experiment—and recognize a good (and bad!) experiment when they see one—or their ability to accurately name the variables?

Even for our psychology majors, how important is it that they understand the variables in their Intro to Psychology course? I bet they’ll be in Research Methods shortly, where the names of the variables will be hammered into their heads by brute force.  If your psych BA program is one of those that does not require Research Methods, I’d love to have a conversation with you about why you’ve dropped it as a requirement. I have some guesses. I also have some stories about how graduates from such programs have fared in grad school. It’s not good.

In any case, I bet students can miss questions about the independent variable and dependent variable on your Intro Psych exam and still pass the course with flying colors. I’m not entirely sure that I had them straight after taking Intro. I am certain I did after Research Methods, though!

What might it look like if we zoomed our testing lens out just a bit so that we have less focus on terminology and greater focus on the concepts themselves? Here are a few examples.

Let’s start with an experimental design question that does not focus on terminology. This first example is based on this blog post.

A psychological scientist wants to test this hypothesis: The quality of a person’s microphone during an interview affects the likelihood of the person being hired. Which would be the best design for the experiment?

1. Ask one volunteer to listen to an interview that was recorded with a high-quality mic and then listen to the same interview recorded with a low-quality mic. Ask the volunteer which person they would prefer to hire.
2. Ask 50 volunteers to listen to an interview that was recorded with a high-quality mic and then listen to the same interview recorded with a low-quality mic. Ask each volunteer which person they would prefer to hire.
3. Ask one volunteer to listen to an interview that was recorded with a high-quality mic, and ask a second volunteer to listen to the same interview recorded with a low-quality mic. Ask each volunteer which person they would prefer to hire.
4. Ask 25 volunteers to listen to an interview that was recorded with a high-quality mic. Ask a different set of 25 volunteers to listen to the same interview recorded with a low-quality mic. Ask all 50 volunteers to rate how likely they would be to hire the interviewee.

Instead of focusing on the term egocentrism, the following question zooms out to the importance of a caregiver knowing that their toddler cannot see the world through someone else’s eyes.

A 3-year-old shoves another child out of the way and takes their cookie.

1. This behavior is expected of young children because they cannot take the perspective of another person.
2. This child is intentionally bullying another child.
3. We expect that this child will grow up to be a narcissist.
4. Both B and C.

Instead of focusing on the term availability heuristic, the following question zooms out to a social media user knowing that how often they hear about something can influence their perception of how often that thing occurs.

On social media, our friend has just watched at least five videos where people were cooking chicken with Nyquil (a very dangerous practice!). Our friend says, “This is great! We must try this! Everyone is doing it!”

1. Our friend is overestimating how often an event occurs based on how available it is in their memory.
2. While it’s unlikely that everyone is doing it, based on our friend’s sample, it is likely that most people are doing it.
3. If we show our friend evidence that this is a dangerous activity, our friend will undoubtedly change their beliefs to ours.
4.  Both B and C

Instead of focusing on the term sensorineural hearing loss, the following question zooms out to a music listener knowing that playing their music through headphones at maximum volume can cause permanent damage and why.

Playing music through headphones or earbuds at maximum volume…

1. Will not cause hearing loss
2. Will cause hearing loss because of damage to the auditory nerve
3. Will cause hearing loss because the loud sound waves damage the cilia in the cochlea
4. May cause ringing in the ears (tinnitus)
5. Both C and D

Instead of focusing on the terms systematic desensitization and extinction, the following question zooms out to a person’s understanding of how to lessen a fear.

Our friend has a fear of needles that is so bad that they refuse any treatment that requires getting a shot. Based on what is known about classical conditioning, what is the most effective way for our friend to reduce their fear?

1. Our friend should continue to avoid needles.
2. Our friend should get a lollipop after every shot.
3. Our friend should have gradual exposure to needles.
4. We should punch our friend in the arm every time they show a fear of needles.

In conclusion, I’m not suggesting that we stop talking about terminology. Giving something a name turns it into a meaningful thing. However, as I consider what my neighbor needs to know about psychology, I’m more interested in the concept and its application rather than what we call it. If these kinds of questions were on a final exam, I wonder how our students would perform and how they would perform if they took that same exam again four years later.