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

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

For the past few days I've been thinking out loud about the importance of narrative form to the mind—that way we have of being much more impressed by information in story form than in statistics or other raw data. Not everyone agrees with the advocates of "narrativity" that narrative is an ... Read More

Literary types used to run the world. To understand life and society, people counted on great orators and poets and interpreters of sacred texts. Political, moral and literary power were the same: Apt analogies and convincing metaphors were taken as arguments, not just pretty wordplay. In medieval ... Read More

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

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

For a certain kind of economic conservative, the cardinal sin of modern governments is printing money whenever they please. Currency's value should be tied to something real, they say, as it was for Americans before 1971, when we were on the gold standard. Let there be a natural limit on the money ... Read More

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

Here at Mind Matters, we aren't big fans of militant atheism, or any other doctrine that prefers to explain away other views, rather than engaging them. I'm convinced that rhetorical chauvinism—the view that arguments that convinced you must convince everyone—is poison to civil society. Now and ... Read More

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