Brent Strickland’s blog

This blog asks how lessons from cognitive science can help us to understand and improve on cultural activities that impact our daily lives such as science, business, and political decision making.

Governments should more frequently publish CO2 emissions data: Leveraging human psychology to fight climate change

The most recent report by the International Panel on Climate Change (2018) states the danger very clearly: urgent action is required to avoid possible climate disaster. The primary cause of global

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Are liberals too dumb to understand this? Virtue signaling in the age of outrage advertising

Through our newsfeeds and social media, we are constantly confronted with articles and headlines (like the headline of this piece) that have been deliberately designed to provoke outrage and attract

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The R-word: “Racism” across the political spectrum

As a professional cognitive scientist, I usually conduct experiments on other people. However I recently carried out a somewhat unique experiment on myself. In this, I switched the political orient

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Does replication matter? The case for conceptual replication and strong inference

Recent findings from a massive collaborative project (OSF, 2015), attempting to replicate many of the findings published in top psychology journals, have suggested that roughly half of these fail to

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Why reading minds is not like reading words

Written by Brent Strickland and Pierre Jacob. In a recent review paper in Science (2014. 344-6190) entitled “The cultural evolution of mind reading,” Cecilia Heyes and Chris Frith argue that

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