Alphapsy blog archive
Today, we retro-publish twenty posts from the (soon to be definitely closed) Alphapsy blog, that some contributors to the ICCI blog - mostly Nicolas Baumard, Hugo Mercier, Olivier Morin and Karim
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 repres
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
How to Corax your theory of mind
Don't know why I decided to take a course in Greek Rhetoric this semester... But readers will be glad to learn that I really had fun! I came across a jewel of a mind-twister, an argument called the
Pitt-Rivers haunts the Musée du Quai Branly
On visiting the brand new Musée du Quai Branly in Paris last Sunday, I was amazed to meet the ghost of one of the most outdated anthropologists of the Victorian Age.
The French Président de la