Letters Remain

Tag: psychology

  • How Language Affects Thinking

    Linguistic relativity is the idea that language differences alone can affect how we perceive world experiences and thus can cause us to behave differently. In an Edge essay, Lera Boroditsky discusses some of her research intoĀ linguistic relativity and how language use (grammar, word choice and language itself) vastly alters our perceptions and thought processes, offering…

  • The Perils of Pop Psychology

    In response to Jane O’Grady’s Open Democracy article critiquing the ‘neuro-social-sciences’, Julian Sanchez outlinesĀ his thoughts on the perils of pop psychology: There are arguments that simply can’t be made in the span of even a longish newspaper or magazine article. If one is writing for a lay audience, in fact, I feel pretty confident that…

  • Body Language and Our Egocentric Blind Spot

    BPS Research Digest reports on a study illustrating our apparent inability to read insights into our personalities from watching a video of our own body language. We are, however, quite adept at making revealing insights on others from similar videos, suggesting we have a sort of “egocentric blind spot”. Why can’t we use a video…

  • 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…

  • The Science of Persuasion

    Persuasion is not an art; it’s a science. That’s according to Yes!ā€”the book by social psychologists Robert Cialdini,Ā Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin that proposes to offer 50 ‘scientifically proven ways to be persuasive’.Ā  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 [ā€¦] have…

  • Thought Suppression

    After reading thisĀ roundup of research into the psychology of thought suppressionĀ 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 BridgeĀ (a 2006 documentary chronicling the stories of those who committed suicide at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge throughout 2004),Ā I came online in search of Jumpersā€”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…