Is terror management theory dying?
In a recent post on the psychology of religion, Hugo judged “dubious that we should be endowed with a fear of death so strong that we need to have other mechanisms to hold it in check”. Actually, Carlos Navarrete and Dan Fessler, two evolutionary psychologists, have already suggested that ...
Long live the majority!
"How should groups make decisions?" this old question is on the way of being answered, as researchers Reid Hastie and Tatsuya Kameda vindicate the use of the majority rule. In a paper [1] published last year in Psychological Review, the authors show by means of extensive simulation and experiments ...
Who thinks the Earth is flat?
Less people than you think. Most people have the representation of Columbus valiantly fighting against the authorities and finally convincing these obscurantist scholars coming right from the middle-ages (actually it was the middle-ages) that the Earth is round and not flat. It turns out that this ...
In praise of babies
No news in this post: its only aim is to remind us of how socially savvy babies are. A review paper in press in trends in cognitive sciences sums up the evidence from developmental psychology and neuroscience.
During a conference a few months ago, some members of the audience were taken aback by ...
The Blushing Brain
This post was first published in 2006 on the Alphapsy blog.
Moral philosophers have long made the distinguo between guilt (the awareness of doing something intrinsically wrong) and shame (the awareness that your behavior is an object of laughter and spite from others). A recent neuroimaging study ...
The face of the thinker
The hindsight bias is the tendency to say after an event happened that “we knew it all along”, that it’s not really surprising. This is a bias because when asked before the event, we wouldn’t have predicted it, but after it happened we think we would have (and because it can be quite ...
Art and patterns
This is an extremely speculative post exploring multimodal perception in artists. It was primed by this fascinating paper [1] written by "a multimedia conceptual artist (...) working on a series of projects that explore the nature of rainbows and the music of waterfalls in relation to the forgotten ...
God is dead?
Atheists (and religious people sometimes too) often think that people believe in God because it shields them from the fear of their own death, or protects them from the idea that their departed loved ones are, well, just dead. Two recent studies confirm this idea: one [1] by showing that being ...
On conformism among social psychologists
In a previous post on deliberative democracy, I said that people [1] often attack deliberative democracy on the ground that people are conformists; and they do so by relying on Asch’s famous experiment. This experiment, although one of the best known in social psychology, has suffered from a ...
The power of mind
Social psychologists from Harvard and Princeton campuses [1] report on belief in magical causation from lay people (as far as students from those places can be considered as laid lay persons representative of the general population...). Reinforcing an already strong case for magical thinking, their ...
Washing away our sins
A nice paper by Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist in Science [1] about the "Macbeth effect" : a threat to one’s moral purity induces the need to wash. This effect revealed itself through an increased mental accessibility of washing-related concepts, a greater desire for cleansing products, and ...
Know thyself, yes – but how?
The importance of self-knowledge has often been emphasized, from traditional lore to New Age gurus. However, there may be very different ways to know thyself. Two of the most important aspects of self-knowledge are autobiographical memory and self-concept and it has been repeatedly shown that these ...
Reassembling Latour
A review of "Reassembling the Social", by Bruno Latour, a handbook that sums up 25 years of controversial research. Still provocative, Latour happily acknowledges the "wreckage" (sic) of the 'Social Studies of Science' program, and debunks (among other trends in the social sciences) social constr...
The naive theories of ‘Honey I shrunk the kids!’
Biomorphologist Michael C. LaBarbera has an amazing paper (actually a seven parts lesson, "The Biology of B-Movie Monsters”, Fathom, 2003) on the physics and biology of B-movie monsters (thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for bringing me this one). It shows that cinema creatures consistently ...
What is neuroaesthetics about anyway?
Martin Skov's Brainethics has a very nice post introducing bioaesthetics, a field that endeavours to use "neuroscience to understand art and aesthetic behaviour". I'd like to take this opportunity to jump up on my soapbox and ask, what exactly do we want biology (or neuroscience) to say about art ? ...
From Sudoku to Spinoza: The Hedonistic Side of Reasoning
We all have a friend who has spent some time trying to convince us that {insert here your personal bête noire, be it mathematics, philosophy or logic} was actually fun. All of these domains involve reasoning, by which I mean pondering on the reasons for our beliefs: mathematicians and logicians ...
Explanations as orgasms
Explanations are necessary. Without them, hunter-gatherers would have trouble learning sophisticated hunting techniques and we would have trouble learning how to program our VCRs (equally terrible threats). Since natural selection tends to make us like things that are good for us, we would expect ...
Naive theories of gender differences in maths
An interesting study (Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2006) [1] sheds some new light on the "gender and math" controversy, (in)famously reignited last year by Larry Summers.
Ilan Dar-Nimrod and Steven Heine have just published a paper entitled "Exposure to Scientific Theories Affects Women's Math ...
Who killed Gwen Stacy?
Or why Superheroes need to know about physics' law of momentum conservation, causal deviance, possible world ontology and memetics.
As a follow-up to Olivier's post The naive theories of ‘Honey I shrunk the kids!’, I would add Superheroes comic books to the list of improbable physics in arts. ...
Do psychiatrists believe in madness?
A short notice of a short paper [1] investigating whether clinicians hold an essentialist view on mental disorders, i.e. whether they consider that mental disorders represent natural kinds possessing "an underlying reality or true nature, shared by members of [the same] category". What is your ...