Letters Remain

Category: psychology

  • Child Well Being in Biological and High-Conflict Familes

    With the timing and sequence of ‘young adult transitions’ bearing importance for successes in later life, this news about these transitions and their occurrence in ‘high-conflict’ families shows that staying together for the sake of the kids doesn’t necessarily help: Compared with children in low-conflict families, children from high-conflict families are more likely to drop…

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach Video Lectures

    Last year I pointed to MIT’s programme dedicated to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach—the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on cognition that defies categorisation. Just to update you on GEB news; MIT have now produced a series of video lectures dedicated to the book. (6 lectures, each approx. 1 hour in length.) (I have a sort of love-hate…

  • The Science of Persuasion

    Persuasion is not an art; it’s a science. That’s according to Yes!—the book by social psychologists Robert Cialdini, Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin that proposes to offer 50 ‘scientifically proven ways to be persuasive’.  For his review of the book, Alex Moskalyuk lists these 50 ways to be persuasive, as gleamed from dozens of psychology studies.…

  • The Problems with Saving

    In 2007 the average American saved 0.6% of their income. By February of this year that had risen to more than 4%, but in the 1980s it was 10%. With this in mind, Tim Harford asks why are we such awful savers, and what can we do to improve the situation? Behavioral economists [
] have…

  • Social Cognition and Staving Off Dementia

    A longitudinal study of health and mental lucidity in the aged—focusing on the huge retirement community of Laguna Woods Village south of Los Angeles—is starting to show some results. From studying members of the so-called ‘super memory club’ (people aged 90+ with near-perfect cognitive abilities) it is being suggested that not all mental activities are…

  • Thought Suppression

    After reading this roundup of research into the psychology of thought suppression you will see that the results are fairly conclusive: it’s counter-productive in almost every circumstance. From research into substance cravings, so-called ‘intrusive’ memories, and even depression, thought suppression has been shown to not work and the act of remembering when attempting to suppress has been…

  • Suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge

    Having just finished watching The Bridge (a 2006 documentary chronicling the stories of those who committed suicide at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge throughout 2004), I came online in search of Jumpers—the article that inspired the film with its comprehensive look at suicide at the bridge. Both the documentary and the article pose some difficult questions but…

  • The Culture of Alcohol

    Realising that “drinking alcohol is one of the most socially meaningful and richly symbolic activities in [British] culture”, Vaughan of Mind Hacks offers a short introduction to what could be an interesting topic; the cultural ‘benefits’ of binge drinking. There’s more to alcohol than getting pissed but you’d never know it from the papers. In…

  • Evolutionary Consumption

    Geoffrey Miller, author of the excellent Mating Mind, has recently released Spent; a look at consumerism and marketing through his lens of evolutionary psychology. With an existing knowledge of evolutionary psychology theories the ideas in Miller’s latest will come as no surprise. These two reviews are still worth perusing, however: Jonathan Gottschall provides a concise…

  • Scams, Cons and the Psychology Behind Them

    Back in January Jason pointed to Wikipedia’s list of confidence tricks; an educational and amusing read. Now, the UK’s Office of Fair Trading has commissioned some research into why people fall victim to scams (pdf). According to the (260 page) report, here are the reasons why successful scams fool us: Appeals to trust and authority.…