What’s the quickest way from the bottom of Bay Street to Eglinton and Yonge? And how about from NYU to Times Square? Or from Checkpoint Charlie to Unter den Linden? If you are familiar with Toronto, New York City, and Berlin, then you can probably answer those questions with relative ease. (Hint: don’t try to […]
It’s close to Christmas. The smell of gingerbread is in the air. The Salvation Army is ringing their bells at every street corner. The sound of “Jingle Bells” is piped onto the sidewalk by your friendly neighborhood department store. “Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jingle all the way. Oh! what fun it is to ride In […]
It’s been a year since we started to roll out the Psychonomics Featured Content section. I published the first post on September 25th, 2014, but there was quite a bit of preparatory work behind the scenes that predates our public appearance, so now is a good time to proclaim “happy anniversary”, or whatever one does after a […]
Video games both challenge and entertain us. We play them for fun, and the more we play the better we get. But might the skills we develop while gaming transfer to other activities? This has been an increasingly hot research question in recent years, with an industry of “brain training” games willing to race ahead of the science, as […]
Quantity (like size) matters when we are making decisions about all aspects of our life. If something costs the same but we have the choice to have more or less of it, have you ever deliberately chosen less? Even when on a diet? There’s a very good reason for this. It is adaptive to go […]
What does Beyoncé have in common with Pamela Anderson, but not with Britney Spears and Angelina Jolie? And what is it that Britney and Angelina have in common? Apparently, Britney and Angelina gave birth to their babies by caesarian section whereas Beyoncé and Pamela gave birth naturally. This is the only thing I know about […]
When the Egyptian King Intef died some 4,000 years ago, his tomb was inscribed with a song that encourages its audience to live a life of what came to be called hedonism: “Revel in pleasure while your life endures… never weary grow/In eager quest of what your heart desires.” Some 3,800 years later, the pursuit of happiness was […]
Nearly every psychologist has experienced the results of an experiment coming up inconclusive, where the statistics couldn’t tell us one way or the other whether our manipulation had worked. These experiments often go straight into the file drawer, to languish forever amongst years-old consent forms. Our distaste for such null results is due in part to […]
Randomness and human cognition generally do not mesh well. We know that all of us, including James Bond, tend to misperceive randomness in various ways. For example, anyone who has seen a basketball player make three shots in a row is likely to rate the chances of another success to be higher than if the player […]
Millions of pilgrims descend upon Mecca every year during the Hajj, one of Islam’s five pillars. The faithful gather to perform several rituals. For example, each person walks counter-clockwise seven times around the Ka’aba, a large black cube that determines the direction of prayer for Muslims around the world. Unfortunately, this event is not without its own list of […]