Category: psychology
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Sharing More Than We Think
Technology writer Nicholas Carr reflects on how what we share online imitates our persona much more than we imagine. Your online self [âŚ] is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself – about which facts (or falsehoods) to…
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Psychology of Learning
Tom Staffordâco-author of Mind Hacksâhas written a series of posts on what psychologists know about learning. For anyone interested in education and personal development, these provide an interesting introduction to a few topics of note. Learning Makes Itself Invisible Once you have learnt something you see the world differently. Not only can you appreciate or…
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Action Through Advertising
Taking a leaf out of the advertisers’ book may be the key to succeeding in the fight against global warming and ecological apathy. At least, that’s the view Robert Butler takes after looking at the successes of a novel advertising campaign used to cut the incidence of littering in Texas: The ads avoided the negatives…
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The Anatomy of a Hit Song
Two great articles on current research into how artists and songs become hits: Group Think looks at research predicting musical hits using “geo-aware query strings” from file-sharing networks such as Gnutella. The geographic location of an emerging artist is the key to predicting their success [âŚ]. “If an artist has the potential to be successful,…
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Traffic Psychology
After visiting Paris and being amazed at how drivers navigate the roads surrounding the Arc de Triomphe without accident, Cognitive Daily‘s Dave Munger reviews Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What it Says About Us and looks at the psychology of traffic and its many counter-intuitive rules-of-thumb. Traffic and highway…
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Is ‘Number Sense’ (or Dyscalculia) Innate?
Is our ability to count and estimate quantity an innate skill, or is it learned? To answer this question The Economist looks briefly at the history of counting; people who speak languages that have words only for ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘few’ and ‘many’; and dyscalculiaâa condition similar to dyslexia where sufferers lack basic ‘number sense’ or…
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Primer on Evolutionary Psychology
The evolutionary psychology theories of human behaviour are fascinating, as anyone who has read Matt Ridley’s acclaimed The Red Queen can attest. For those that haven’t, however, The Economist has created what may be the best primer on evolutionary psychology I’ve read. No one is suggesting Darwinism has all the answers to social questions. Indeed, with some,…
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Misunderstanding and Rethinking Expertise
The public’s distrust of scientific experts has been growing in recent years, as is worryingly evident with subjects such as Creationism and particle physics (think: the LHC)âbut why is this happening? Harry Collins and Robert Evans, sociologists at my alma mater, Cardiff University, believe it has to do with a “misunderstanding of expertise itself”. They talk…
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Richard Dawkins and Derren Brown on Psychics
For the documentary The Enemies of Reason the ‘psychological illusionist’ Derren Brown gets interviewed by Richard Dawkins, and the two discuss psychics and the techniques they use (e.g. Forerâor Barnumâeffects). This hour-long ‘uncut’* interview also covers Derren’s fascinating account of moving from faith to scepticism to atheism: definitely worth a watch, even if you already…