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 […]
Learning and Memory
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 […]
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 […]
It was once thought that what we perceive is a straightforward reflection of a stable reality. So, we see a circle to be a certain size because it is a certain size. A quick glance at illusions such as the Ebbinghaus illusion and the Rubik’s cube color illusion clearly show that this is not the case: what we perceive […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.” This 1973 announcement by Richard Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, effectively admitted to the mendacity of all previous statements issued by the White House on the Watergate scandal. Most flip-flops by politicians are less monumental, although they can sometimes haunt an entire election campaign: During the […]
A common idea in educational theory is that “active” or “self-directed” learning tends to be better than passive forms of instruction. That is, as compared to watching a lecture or listening to a discussion, students learn more effectively when they take an active role in deciding what to learn and how to learn about it. The notion that […]
Statins reliably reduce cholesterol levels and help save lives by preventing or ameliorating cardiovascular disease. But they have side effects: About 1 in 10 people suffer nosebleeds, a sore throat, headaches, or muscle and joint pain, to name but a few of the common side effects. On balance, however, statins are widely believed to be saving lives. So […]