Psychology

The attention we give to (or withhold from) tragedies has little to dowith numbers: many hundreds can die in a cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe or hundreds of thousands in an earthquake in China and it receives nowhere near the press and public outrage as nearly 200 killed in terrorist attacks in Mumbai. (This isn’t meant to diminish the tragedy of Mumbai, only to act as comparison.) Still, we can imagine the evolutionary logic of this: our mind quickly jumps to the cause of a disaster, evaluating it for relevance toour own survival. Once we’ve “solved the crime” of culpability, it’s as…

Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!" When we roll home with only bagels, I feel I've won. No more. I've armed myself with the tools of illogic, thus guaranteeing I win every marital argument from this point forward. You can too. Use the following brain-deflating fallacies to ensure dominance in debate club and/or with unsuspecting significant other. • Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc: Because x follows y, y caused x—"See? Now you have an upset stomach! Thus, my…

How To Win Any Argument (Part 1) and (Part 2) Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!" When we roll home with only bagels, I feel I've won. No more. I've armed myself with the tools of illogic, thus guaranteeing I win every marital argument from this point forward. You can too. Use the following brain-deflating fallacies to ensure dominance in debate club and/or with unsuspecting significant other. • False Dilemma: There may be other options…—"Either you admit…

Go here for Part 1 Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!" When we roll home with only bagels, I feel I've won. No more. I've armed myself with the tools of illogic, thus guaranteeing I win every marital argument from this point forward. You can too. Use the following brain-deflating fallacies to ensure dominance in debate club and/or with unsuspecting significant other. • Denying the Antecedent: If x, then y. Not x. Therefore not y—"If I had fudge on my chin,…

Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!" When we roll home with only bagels, I feel I've won. No more. I've armed myself with the tools of illogic, thus guaranteeing I win every marital argument from this point forward. You can too. Use the following brain-deflating fallacies to ensure dominance in debate club and/or with unsuspecting significant other. • Appeal to Ignorance: if it isn't proven, it's false—"Did you SEE me bogart the last of the jamocha almond…

There are some commonalities that almost everyone in the autism community can get solidly behind and that is the issue of filicide. Too many children in this country are killed by their parents. One such murder alone is too many. Of course, our attention is brought to bear when we hear autism in conjunction with a child murder.A Dallas woman murdered her two young children because, according to her 911 call, they were autistic. While our attention is focused on this case, as parents in the online community argue that media attention is on this case because of autism, and…

It has been known for quite some time that exercise promotes neurogenesis, but now a study by Leuner, Glasper, and Gould, published by PLoS ONE this month, claims that the most intimate form of exercise - sexual activity - can produce the same effects.  And better yet- having multiple, repeated sexual experiences results in a greater positive effect than a single experience alone. Added bonus: it reduces anxiety as well.  I love that kind of data! A lot of bloggers have been buzzing about this study for a few days now.  I mean, understandably so.  Who doesn't want to hear…

Humans are very, very bad at being random. In roshambo, aka rock, paper, scissors, this leads to probabilities and patterns which you can exploit to give your RPS opponent(s) severe and repeated thumpings. There are two ways to go about this: knowing the psychology and creating new psychology. First, it's useful to understand the generally held associations of the three symbols: rock is solid, aggressive and steadfast; scissors are aggressive in a more tactical way; and paper is flaccid, like shooting a very wet toilet paper spitball. Because of these (some claim), men are more likely to…

Your brain is used to trying to win rock, paper, scissors. And so if you happen to see rock coming down, it's much easier to adjust your throw mid-flight to shoot paper than it is to adjust your throw to scissors (both, by the way, are cheating). Researchers measured this by showing subjects a string of RPS symbols on a computer screen, with a symbol every 1.5 seconds. The researchers had one group respond to the images by shooting winning symbols and another group respond by intentionally shooting losing symbols. To lose, subjects' prefrontal cortexes had to squirt some serious…

Superstition may work if you think it works.   If only voodoo were so easy, we'd love to have an army of zombies at our command. But people, and certainly athletes, maintain any number of superstitious rituals, so Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock and Thomas Mussweiler of the University of Cologne designed a set of experiments to see if activating  people's superstitious beliefs would improve their performance on a task.  Their research says that having some kind of lucky token can actually improve performance – but by increasing self-confidence and not any magical mojo.…