Psychology

A new article from the Association for Psychological Science (APS) begins with the premise that our ancestors avoided outsiders because they might carry disease.  Therefore, it apparently seems reasonable to conclude that by washing our hands and getting vaccinated, we reduce such primal pressures and join the Age of Aquarius (or some such conclusion). "Our distant ancestors had to avoid outsiders who might have carried disease." Personally, I always find it interesting that despite knowledge of other animal's behaviors, especially regarding competition and territory, it is always…

Once when I was a little kid, a peaceful fall evening at our house was shattered by loud and insistent banging, as if someone was trying to break down our side door. My dad, who was the head coach of the high school football team, opened it to greet a man who was screaming with fury. Despite the fact that he was a friend of my father's, this man was now beside himself with rage, drunk, practically incomprehensible, spitting foam and bellowing invective. My dad’s friendship-destroying crime? He had switched the man’s son from first string to second string on the team.  We Americans take…

A study in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology by some folks at University of Notre Dame conducted three experiments and concluded that if you walk into a room and forget what you came to do, the doorway is responsible. The environment can likely affect memory, we get that - I have often forgotten to take out the garbage even though my wife insists she told me to do so, because I was playing my PS3 - but doorways as 'event boundaries' means we can get away with almost anything.  The doorway to a strip club can be attributed to forgetting you are not allowed to go to…

Precognition (from the Latin præ-,“before,” + cognitio, “acquiring knowledge”), is usually filed under esoteric pseudoscience. There are scientific articles on precognition, but pointing this out often results in the rare admission that scientific journals’ peer review can be flawed badly, so badly that complete nonsense gets all the way through the long process. The latter is very true but seldom admitted. All this is a cultural phenomenon, a question of belonging; naïve scientism wants to lynch you for mentioning clairvoyance but discussing time travel is fine, go figure. Ray Hyman, a…

You know them you hate them, but no one creates fun research that matches confirmation bias more than BeautifulPeople.com, and they are at it again.  Their latest findings - from online dating site users, of course - exposes an ugly truth of online dating: Women lie more than men, and Americans are bigger liars than the Brits.  Women lie about their looks and men lie about their jobs in the battle to find a partner through Internet dating, according to a survey of 1,000 single adults commissioned by BeautifulPeople.com.  The survey of single men and women, all of whom belong…

If you've ever thought you were being abducted by an alien or, if you are 400 years old, seduced by a succubus, and couldn't move, you are not alone.   A new article in Sleep Medicine Reviews says 7.6% of the population has had the same experience and it's called sleep paralysis.The psychologists define sleep paralysis as "a discrete period of time during which voluntary muscle movement is inhibited, yet ocular and respiratory movements are intact" and it often involves hallucinations. They examined 35 published studies, which consisted of surveys - I know, reviews of surveys again…

It's always a little surreal to see a new comment in the email on an old article. The older the article is, the stranger it is, especially when the comment itself is bizarre. Back in May, I wrote the (my) last major piece on anti-vaccine rhetoric; nothing much more to say, really, as the rhetoric hasn't changed. The article itself was rather innocuous, but the comments got heated. This morning, a person who has commented  on that same piece, I believe (same IP), but under another screen name, wrote this in response to a comment left by Ken Reibel back in June:…

by Michael W. Taft It seems right now as if everyone has an opinion on the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, which has gone nationwide in America and spread to many cities worldwide. OWS has incited praise, rage, donations, police crackdowns, hilarity, and kickstarted a new round of American political conversation. There have been many attempts in the media to understand the motivations behind the movement, and most of them, like this New York Times article, center on the perceived “anger” of the demonstrators. But what is the driving force behind OWS? Changing Demographics and…

In a few short hours, the World Series will begin between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals.  In the midst of all the talk of how offense is winning games this year (team Earned Run Average by starters in the post-season is over 5) and the strategic match-ups, there will be little attention paid to the belief engines in the skulls of individual players; their brains. Texas Rangers game 1 starter C.J. Wilson has a set of performance-enhancing rituals that go way beyond never cleaning his batting helmet.  He doesn't like to take any sort of drug, or alcohol, for example,…

If words are windows into the soul, scientists are learning to be Peeping Toms: Computerized text analysis shows that psychopathic killers make identifiable word choices beyond their conscious control when talking about their crimes and that insight could lead to new tools for diagnosis and perhaps law enforcement and social media. The words of psychopathic murderers match their personalities, which reflect selfishness, detachment from their crimes and emotional flatness, says Jeff Hancock, Cornell professor of computing and information science, and colleagues at the University of British…