Category: psychology
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Dopamine and the Social Brain
In a recent article for Seed, Jonah Lehrer writes about new research from the neuroscientist Read Montague linking dopamine to complex social phenomena. There is so much great stuff in the article that I find it difficult to quote just one piece. I’ve decided on this anecdote that I happen to find slightly amusing: The…
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Freudian Projection: An Evolutionary Explanation
Some interesting research has been attempting to give an evolutionary psychology explanation for psychological projection. Using Silence of the Lambs, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead and Koyaanisqatsi, no less. We project emotions on others based on our own emotional state, but those projections are functional: We don’t project fear if we’re afraid…
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All About Self-Control
The Boston Globe has an interesting article discussing the noted ‘marshmallow experiment’ of delayed gratification and the future of research in this area. A 4-year-old is left sitting at a table with a marshmallow or other treat on it and given a challenge: Wait to eat it until a grown-up comes back into the room,…
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Attempts to Appear Racially Colour-Blind Begin at 9 Years Old
A recent study has identified the age at which children begin attempting to appear racially unprejudiced. One hundred and one children, predominantly White, half of whom were aged 8 to 9, the other half being aged 9 to 10, participated in a task reminiscent of the board game “Guess Who?” Presented with photos of 40…
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Why We Can’t Imagine Death
Jesse Bering of Scientific American argues that, due to the very nature of our consciousness, almost everyone has a tendency to imagine the mind continuing to exist after the death of the body. People in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to…
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Why ‘Politics of Fear’ Works
Negative campaigning has been a constant of American elections for as long as I can remember, and is now making its way into mainstream UK politics. Seed looks at how evolution can explain both the appeal and recent failings of negative campaigning. Advertisers, like neuroscientists, started out with a so-called cognitive model of decision making — a…
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Higher IQ = Longer Life
According to Lab Notes, new research is suggesting that a higher IQ is an indication that you may live a longer life. A number of recent studies have been finding that people who score lower on intelligence tests (notice how careful I am not to say “smarter people”) tend to die earlier than those who…
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The Seven Sins of Memory
According to Daniel Schacter, there are seven fundamental ways in which our memories fail us. Schacter elaborates in his book of the same name, and now PsyBlog has produced a series of articles on each of these ‘seven sins of memory’: Transience Absent-Mindedness Blocking Misattribution Suggestibility Bias Persistence
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False Advertising (With Statistics) Works
Recent advertising research shows how numerical specifications drastically influence our choices: even if they’re meaningless and contradict our personal experience. Bigger numbers, it seems, are what we want: no matter how abstract or inane. The first test involved megapixels. The authors took a single image, and used Photoshop to create a sharper version, and one…
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Our Evolutionary Predisposition to Faith
The anthropologist Pascal Boyer asks, “Is religion a product of our evolution?” and in doing so he concludes that it may be easier to believe than to reject faith. In the past ten years, the evolutionary and cognitive study of religion has begun to mature. It does not try to identify the gene or genes…