Tag: social psychology
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The other day commenter Cotdail took issue with a tossed-off aside in my post about religion and happiness. I said the hostility of militant atheists to religion borders on madness, to which Cotdail replied: "I fail to recognise anything that is 'bordering on a kind of madness' about being hostile ... Read More
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Don't just kill that guy, says Paul Rubens in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "Kill him a lot." It's a funny line (a great line, really) because it plays with the on-off logic of death: In the vampireless real world, you're either dead or you aren't. There's no "more" or "less" to it. But in the human ... Read More
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However you feel about the right way out of the U.S. government's struggles over its debt ceiling, I think we can all agree that the week past has not been a good advertisement for representative democracy. What it has been, though, is a fine illustration of the gap between real human behavior and ... Read More
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Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. -- Victor Klemperer In the aftermath of the Norway catastrophe, some anti-Islamists have offered a clever defense against those who ... Read More
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They live in a parallel society, a world apart, where they obey an alien law and pray to an alien God. Their liberal allies foolishly promote toleration and claim these strangers can be assimilated, but that will never happen. Whatever their public face, their real goal is to take over our society ... Read More
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Newt Gingrich, the thinking man's Glenn Beck, is said to be a viable Presidential candidate because he has fresh, creative ideas. Even if you accept that notion at face value, you have to wonder how much of an advantage it will be. As this study (pdf) suggests, people tend to see creativity and ... Read More
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This study just out in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin claims to have found a general societal prejudice against women who breast-feed. Reports about the work concurred. But I think it works better as an example of what's wrong with our conceptions of prejudice. It's also good fodder for ... Read More
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A week's worth of comments and emails about the "After Thought" project have reminded me that the words "rational" and "irrational" can't be bandied about loosely. Talk about the subject risks falling into what the historian David Hackett Fischer calls "the fallacy of equivocation"—where "a term is ... Read More
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In a technology-based culture, you learn from infancy that truth is what can be counted and measured. That makes it easy to divide any conversation into what you learned (important!) and how you learned it (immaterial). What your medical tests reveal is vital; how your doctor tells you, her ... Read More
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Colonel Russell Williams is one of those double-life people—an able military commander who was also a rapist and murderer. The crimes for which he was sentenced last month were shockingly evil, and that led the Canadian military last week to enact a real-life version of a well-known psychology ... Read More
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About Mind Matters
In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. Mind Matters is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. Most importantly, it's about how this sea change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that still run on the presumption that people act rationally.
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In A Shipwreck, Your Heart Is More Likely To Go On If You're Male