Letters Remain

Category: psychology

  • Running a Social Experiment on a City

    WhenĀ academicĀ Antanas Mockus became mayor ofĀ BogotĆ” he used the opportunity to run a social experiment on a grand scale. Soon enough, crime was reduced, road deaths were down, and there were 400 trained mimesĀ improving both traffic and citizens’ behaviour. Seriously. “The distribution of knowledge is the key contemporary task,” Mockus said. “Knowledge empowers people. If people…

  • Our Convenient Overconfidence

    Overcoming Bias looks at two research papers on overconfidence, concluding that we “are more overconfident on tasks we don’t actually expect to perform, and when we don’t expect to have to explain our evaluation to others”. On performance: Participants made predictions about performance on tasks that they did or did not expect to complete.Ā  In…

  • Scale of Stressful Life Events and The Misdiagnosis of Sadness

    Mind Hacks points us to a recent article in Psychiatric News arguing that the current definition of ‘major depression’ has led to misdiagnoses of ‘normal sadness’. They argue that the diagnosis contains no qualifications about whether the reaction is appropriate in the context of the person’s life, meaning that people who have suffered unemployment, relationship…

  • Experimenting with Ganzfeld Hallucinations

    After reading a recent issue of Cortex, Mind Hacks goes into some detail discussing the Ganzfeld procedure: The Ganzfeld procedure exposes the participant to ‘unstructured’ sensations usually by placing half ping-pong balls over the eyes so they can only see diffuse white light and by playing white noise through headphones. It is probably best known…

  • Sine Wave Speech: How Prior Knowledge Affects Perception

    Sine wave speech Essentially, what initially sounds like random whistling sounds comes together as coherent speech when you know what you’re listening out for. via Mind Hacks

  • The Nerd Handbook and Caring for Your Introvert

    Rands In Repose’s Nerd Handbook is an essay on understanding geeks; from our insatiable appetite for knowledge to our hard-to-decipher social interaction ‘skills’. The Handbook is at times painfully precise. The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the…

  • Gladwell, Journo-gurus, and Anecdotes as Science

    You can guarantee that whenever Malcolm Gladwell brings out a book he’ll make headlines. And with his latest book having recently been released, here are a number of interesting and contrasting views. First (via Kottke, and in Gladwell’s own words), what to expect from Outliers: though the story of Sidney Weinberg, from high-school dropout to…

  • The Nature of Gender

    Using the story of 8-year-old Brandon, The Atlantic discusses the nature of gender, and the issues of ‘treating’ gender identity disorder in children. It took the gay-rights movement 30 years to shift from the Stonewall riots to gay marriage; now its transgender wing, long considered the most subversive, is striving for suburban normalcy too. The…

  • Pleasure and the Multiplicity of Self

    The Atlantic has a fascinating article on the psychology of pleasure, where the author suggests that we each consist of multiple selves, all in conflict, vying for control and separate desires. Of particular interest is the act of self-bindingā€”the taking of actions to prevent a later ‘self’ succumbing to temptationā€”and its development. I recently studied…

  • Debating the Merits of Neuroeconomics and Behavioural Economics

    Prospect magazine hosts a debate on whether or not behavioural economics is as important as many of its advocates laud. As the BPS Research Digest says, In this [ā€¦] debate, Pete Lunn (author of Basic Instincts) argues that behavioural economics will “deliver a revolutionary new way of understanding the world.” In response Tim Harford (author…