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. […]
You are stranded on a desert island or in the grasslands of a foreign country, without food or water or transportation. Your only friend is a volleyball. Somewhat annoyingly, a prescient memory researcher has pinned a list of words to a tree with instructions for you to rate their relevance to your situation. How relevant is […]
Your spacecraft is spiraling out of control and you will hit Planet Zorg unless you quickly fire up the thermal afterboosters. You fumble for the starter button in the tumbling cockpit…. Which of the two buttons below is more likely to allow you to fire up the boosters on time? Would you be more likely […]
We are social beings. As much as we admire the “rugged individualist”, from the Lone Ranger to Crocodile Dundee, in reality most of us are sensitive to the behavior of others around us. We conform to “social norms” on a myriad of occasions: when queueing for the bus, when participating in recycling because our neighbors do, when we do […]
A picture is worth a thousand words—or is it? How does a pulley work? What about a block and tackle? According to Wikipedia, “A pulley is a wheel on an axle that is designed to support movement and change of direction of a cable or belt along its circumference.” When multiple pulleys are combined together “so […]
We all want more power. Statistical power, that is, to detect an effect in the presence of noise even if it is small. But is this always true? Power seems to be something we should all strive for, just like replicability. The reality is however a bit more nuanced: A few weeks ago I wrote about the […]
There is physics. Then there is psychology. And never the twain shall meet? No, quite to the contrary: The nature of the relationship between the physical world and its psychological representation is among the most studied—and understood—of all mental phenomena. For more than 150 years, psychophysicists have been studying the mapping between physical quantities, such as weight […]
“Magic mirror in my hand, who is the fairest in the land?” Grimm and Grimm (1812) were among the first to note that mirrors do not always provide the perceiver with the desired or expected result. Two centuries later, our methodologies have become vastly more sophisticated but researchers are still fascinated by how people process information in […]
“I see a train wreck looming”—Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman did not mince words in a 2012 email to colleagues in which he drew attention to what he considered a potential replication crisis in at least some areas of psychology. Kahneman’s skepticism was fed by failed attempts to replicate classic priming studies, increasing concerns about replicability in psychology more […]
There will come a time when George W. Bush and Barack Obama will be remembered as poorly as Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur are today, according to Psychonomic researchers Henry Roediger and Andrew DeSoto, who have examined how rapidly well-known people are forgotten from our collective historical memories. Their work appeared in Science last week after being presented […]