A true learning experience. Acting outside the classroom!

Last summer, students, refugees, academics, and practitioners from different nations and disciplines came together to explore the complexity of migration, the problems around it, and alternatives to current practices in policy and society at the RUG. The summer school ‘Migration Matters’ resulted in three concrete student initiatives to improve the lives of refugees.

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With great power comes great responsibility… right?

Many hope that Donald Trump will behave appropriately now that he is president –arguably the most powerful position on earth. Research, however, shows that power usually increases the correspondence between people’s internal beliefs, states and traits and their behavior. In Trump’s case this could potentially be unfortunate news.

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Too bad to be true? An antidote to PosPos (Positivist Philosophy of Science) and the Crises in Social Psychology

We all know that we test theories by subjecting them to experimental test, allowing us to potentially falsify hypotheses. But where do theories come from? A realist philosophy of science, and the method of retroduction, allows us to use empirical evidence, even from “failed” experiments, to generate as well as test theory.

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A fixed or a growth mindset? Why we should emphasize the context-dependent and malleable nature of students’ mindsets regarding intelligence

The importance of whether students believe in their ability to become smarter (i.e., “mindsets”) in helping students to realize their learning potential is increasingly gaining mainstream attention. But what does it mean to have a certain kind of mindset, how does it develop, and how can it be changed? I discuss a new way of thinking about the nature of mindsets that emphasizes the contextualized nature of mindsets, and that changes the way that we can answer these questions.

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Networks in psychology: more than a pretty picture?

Network analysis enables researchers to visualize the relations between people, objects, and concepts. Here, Dr. Bringmann shows how the technique can be generalized to psychopathology: the complex constellation of symptoms that co-occur with Major Depression can be mapped, and the map itself can be analyzed. This then illustrates an emerging approach to understanding psychopathology.

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