from month 08/2011

Epistemic vigilance… and epistemic recklessness

We have all enjoyed, if that is the right word, conversations with people who seem to have no great regard for the niceties of argument and evidence - people who tell you that homeopathy does work because it cured them of a common cold, in a few days… Or that the FBI (or other such agencies) ...

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Why are human beings so interested in explaining misfortune?

(Enter our super-competition and win a mega-prize!) Some time ago, a lady in France had the pleasure of seeing her lottery ticket win the jackpot (several million euros), only to have her dream blown to smithereens by an untoward incident. To establish that a claim is valid, the lottery is legally ...

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Uncovering and Punishing Unconscious Bias

Uncovering and Punishing Unconscious Bias (link to the article) Philip E. Tetlock, Gregory Mitchell and L. Jason Anastasopoulos Recent technological advances in psychology hold out the promise of detecting unconscious biases before they cause harm. Advocates of the technology may fail to ...

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Google Effects on Memory

A new article entitled "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips" by Sparrow, Liu & Wegner should be of interest to scholars interested in the effect of culture on cognition. It documents the effect of having access to online ressources of ...

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Social influences on self-control

Social influences on "self"-control (link to the article) Joe Kable, University of Pennsylvania As Duckworth and Kern (2011) note, currently over 1% of the abstracts in PsycInfo are indexed by “self-control” or one its synonyms. As part of this widespread interest, cognitive and neural ...

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