Have you ever met anyone who dislikes magic tricks? No, me neither. Magicians and magic tricks seem to be universally appreciated in western culture. Whether it is at corporate events, kids’ birthday parties, or simply at the pub down the road, magic is fun and attracts an appreciative audience of all ages. One question that […]
The following guidelines were adopted in 2012 and were updated in 2019 by Alexander Etz, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Richard Morey. The guidelines have a permanent home here, but they are provided as a blogpost here to enable interested members to comment. The Psychonomic Society’s Publications Committee and Ethics Committee and the Editors-in-Chief of the Society’s […]
When you think of creativity what do you imagine? There are a lot of examples to choose from, like cooking up a new take on a traditional dish, working with a team to reason through a difficult business problem, writing short stories, trouble-shooting an engineering problem that had everyone else stumped, or coming up with […]
It is rare that we can do two things at once—if someone asks you to rub your stomach and pat your head, odds are that you’ll rub your head. A better strategy for a lot of different cognitive tasks is to switch between them. Switching typically comes at a cost, however. Switching can even negatively […]
Statistical graphs are so ubiquitous and part of our daily work that we may forget how powerful they are. Since their invention by William Playfair a little over 200 years ago, graphs have become indispensable tools not just in science and business, but also in politics. Indeed, one of Playfair’s contributions was to draw attention […]
Think of any movie scene. Was the scene that came to mind a pleasant one? Something funny or romantic? Or more harrowing? When I did this exercise, a scene from the horror film, The Ring, came to mind before a scene from the comedy, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That is, for me, a negative scene came to mind […]
Cogito ergo sum. This famous utterance by René Descartes translates into “I think, therefore I am.” Thinking is what ostensibly makes us human—quite literally so because homo sapiens means “wise man”. But do we really think (much)? If we are so wise, how come fake election news stories outperformed real news on Facebook during the U.S. presidential […]