Tag: psychology
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Psychology is rich in findings that emerge from complex statistics done on the behavior of college students behaving for money or course credit. It's fair to wonder, then, how well those findings relate to the real world: Maybe a result is peculiar to undergrads, or maybe it's a subtle effect that ... Read More
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Strictly speaking, a "psychopundit" is William Saletan's term for a scholar who uses psychology to explain what's wrong with people who don't vote for Democrats or recycle or otherwise agree with the pundit's left-wing views. But why limit the coinage to liberal malcontents? "Psychopundit" could ... Read More
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A lot of ink has been spilled over the inconsistent and illogical ways that human beings make choices. Not as much attention has been paid to the decision to make a choice in the first place. Before you can pick between Raspberry and Vanilla, after all, you have to choose to enter the store. And ... Read More
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Today marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic in the North Atlantic, from which many of us get the notion that when a ship goes down, it's "women and children first" into the lifeboats. After all, the survival rate for first-class women passengers, according to Wikipedia's handy ... Read More
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If I were trapped in a burning building, here's who I would want to see coming up the smoke-filled stairwell: A trained professional firefighter in full gear. Not Mayor Bloomberg. Nothing against the mayor, but a healthy democratic society protects its people with institutions, not the magic powers ... Read More
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Why do people get fat, increasing their personal risk of heart disease, diabetes and other "lifestyle" diseases and society's risk of fiscal collapse from the expense of treating millions of people with those ailments? Conventional wisdom, favored by governments and a vast and growing "wellness ... Read More
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Human irrationality is an important and fascinating subject, especially when it's pitted against the assumption that people are rational, which still dominates modern life. Sometimes though evidence of human irrationality is presented in a glib and trivializing argument that amounts to this: "Other ... Read More
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Happy International Day of You, women of the world. Unfortunately it remains internationally respectable to argue that science has shown that men are inherently better at math and scientific pursuits than you are. This belief is based on the gender difference in scores on standardized tests ... Read More
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Why can't the Greeks be more like the Germans? Could it be because they speak Greek? There's no doubt some nations save more money than others, and plan better for retirement, and watch their collective weight, but the proposed explanations for different levels of future-mindedness have been ... Read More
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Anything "organic" or "low-fat" must be good for you, right? Ask people how fattening those organic chocolate-covered peanuts are, and they'll guess a lower number than they did for the non-organic version. They'll also eat more than they would have otherwise. The same goes for "low-fat" products ... 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