Category: psychology
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Exercise and the Placebo Effect
Can the placebo effect work with exercise and fitness? Two Harvard psychologists decided to find out, and the results were startling. 84 maids at seven carefully matched hotels [were quizzed on] how much exercise they got. Fully a third of the women said they got no exercise at all, while two-thirds said they did not…
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Gödel, Escher, Bach
On a large number of ‘best of’ or ‘books that changed my life’ lists I always spot Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB), the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter. When my copy arrived at my door recently I was taken aback by this tome and realised that it was going to be a dense read that…
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Patient HM Online
I keep forgetting that audio recordings of Patient HM talking to scientists are online. Brain Connection has a good overview of HM, and NPR discusses him in HM’s Brain and the History of Memory. When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his…
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Overcoming the Tip-of-the-Tongue Effect
The hows and whys on helping overcome the Tip-of-the-Tongue effect (PDF): One of the most fascinating things about the tip-of-the-tongue state, is that it demonstrates how sometimes we know that we know something, without actually being able to recall it. This is part of what psychologists call ‘metacognition’, which allows us to realise when we…
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Social Engineering 101
Kevin Mitnick and Emmanuel Goldstein are undoubtedly the most widely known names in the black hat community*. In a series of videos from CNET News, they describe and demonstrate social engineering techniques. On the same subject, this video demonstrating how easy it is to social engineer you way into clubs by pretending you’re the DJ…
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The Meaning of Our Food Preferences
I love reading about food-related psychological studies and this one on how our eating preferences are influenced (by our personal values, the food’s cultural meaning, and its physical appearance) is no exception: How we feel about a sausage […] says more about our personal values than about what the sausage actually tastes like. A large…
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More Psychology of Mirrors
Mind Hacks has brought to my attention a number of interesting mirror-related studies: Mirror Agnosia […] a condition where people lose their sense of reflection. In these cases, the patient still has intact knowledge about mirrors, they can describe what they do and how they work, but they can’t seem to put it into practice.…
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The Psychology of Mirrors
The Psychology of Mirrors Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, [and] were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion. “When people are made to be self-aware,…
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Best Psychology Articles (2003-2006)
In 2006—to mark its three year anniversary—the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest asked some of the world’s best psychology bloggers to discuss a psychology journal article from the last three years which they found inspiring or that changed the way they think. The result: the best psychology articles from 2003–2006 Just how good are police…
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Visual Cliff: Infant Depth Perception
Original archive video of Gibson and Walk’s Visual Cliff experiment: testing infant depth perception by getting them to walk over glass plates suspended above a drop. The researchers wanted to find out whether 6 to 14 month-old infants could perceive depth. The study put the infants, one at a time, in the middle of a…