The clouds are pillows. Time is a thief. Life is a journey. According to Groucho Marx a hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running. And I wish I could write a Psychonomics post as fast as a speeding bullet—but because I can’t, all other commitments today will be delayed by virtue of the […]
Anyone who has ever written a book knows how long and arduous the process can be. Anyone who has authored 2 or 3 books should take justifiable pride in their accomplishments. But I know no one who could conceivably author more than 500 books. It sounds preposterous to even think that this many books might […]
The ball is about 20 cm from the hole. The grass is smooth. There is no wind, it is not raining, and you have done this hundreds of times before. A gentle tap and you sink the ball. Just as you would expect from looking at the picture below. Now replay the scenario in your […]
Do children misbehave during a full moon? Are Asians “pushy”? Are the members of minority group X particularly prone to alcoholism? People often fall prey to developing such associations even though they are entirely illusory—that is, the actual statistics of the environment warrant no such beliefs. In the laboratory, those illusory correlations are readily evoked […]
Why do people cooperate? Why do we band together in extraordinary numbers to solve problems? Why do we commit acts of “heroism” to protect or save others, including sometimes people we don’t even know personally? The level of cooperation that humans routinely exhibit poses an evolutionary puzzle and an enigma to economists. The essence of cooperation is the fact […]
Mozart was a child prodigy. He composed from the age of five, and at 17—an age at which many parents would be reluctant to entrust their son with the keys to the family car—Mozart was appointed a court musician in Salzburg. Was his talent genetically determined or did he have the good fortune to be […]
Human beings communicate in nearly 7,000 different languages. A surprisingly—and perhaps concerningly—large number of those languages is “endangered”, with nearly 500 (or 6%-7%) being listed by UNESCO. Scholars have warned that “World languages are now rapidly being lost”, and like the loss of species diversity, this language extinction has been attributed to economic development—the more successful a […]
My last post dealt with lying—not an unimportant topic given that around 60% of people lie at least once during a 10-minute conversation. It is therefore perhaps concerning that people are by and large quite poor at detecting deception, including law-enforcement personnel such as members of the CIA, the FBI, NSA, and DEA (to name but a few […]
Do you ever lie? Many people would consider this to be a highly confronting question, not only because all of us (sometimes) lie but also because we believe that there is a general moral imperative not to lie. There is actually considerable debate about the moral imperative against lying among philosophers, and it is easy to come up with […]
Strawberries taste great. So does Rogan Josh or falafel, though perhaps not all together at the same time. What does it mean for something to “taste great”? Wikipedia tells us that “Taste is the sensation produced when a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with taste receptor cells located on taste buds.” But is that it? No. […]