Psychology

We know that corporations go where their market is. Whole Foods sets up shop in wealthy, progressive counties while smaller companies like Monsanto market to rural farmers. What about fast food companies? The claims have been that since there are obese people near places where high densities of restaurants exist, the restaurants must cause the obesity. Less considered is that people might move to where more food choices are and where those are dense, such as in cities, people tend to be more educated. A new paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition finds the opposite of what weak…

A theory is a very precise thing in science - yet some scientists can't resist using the term to lend intellectual weight to what may be a hypothesis and is likely just reasonable speculation. It's a large part of the reason why the term has become colloquialized, and 'wellness' is equivalent to gravity in the minds of some. Physical science is not immune. String Theory put theory in the name, so it gets to skate on the edges of truth, but theoretical physicists are trying to recapture the Golden Age of the 1930s, plus write a bestselling book. Astrophysics should know better. Yet many have…

No, this post is not about some exotic new physics model predicting dark photons or other useless concoctions which physicists sometimes entertain with, in their frustration for the lack of guidance from experimental data of what really is it  that the Standard Model is an effective theory of. For that kind of stuff, please wait and check out my blog at some other time. Rather, this post is about lucid dreams, a quite surprising state of human mind about which I have had occasion to blog earlier. This time I would like to discuss how lucid dreams may provide a controlled environment to…

Kids are stimulated by new experiences. So are pigs. If you watched the 2014 video where a camera falls out of a plane and crashes into a pig sty you saw how intrigued they were by it, even though it clearly was not food. A new study says that such "consumerism", a preference for shiny new stuff, is universal across the animal kingdom. And they showed it in piglets. At the Piglet Nutrition and Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois, 3- and 4-week-old piglets were given dog toys to play with. Then, after a certain delay, they were given that toy again, along with a new one.…

Mothers supportive of their children's negative emotions rate their children as being more socially skilled than teachers do. Not really a big surprise, parents often think the way they have chosen to do things is the best way, even if their kids seem like many to be, well, brats. Mothers’ supportive reactions were instead correlated to fewer socioemotional skills and more problem behaviors by third-grade teachers, who obviously see a different side of children. Nonetheless, these contrasting patterns suggest a potential downside to mothers’ supportiveness of children’s negative emotions for…

In this writing, I want to show how common psychological biases lead to the (largely incorrect) belief that young people in their adolescent years are incompetent, immature, and incapable of responsibly making decisions for themselves. In particular, it is evident that, while very young children are naturally incapacitated, at some point people become competent to make decisions for themselves, enter into contracts, and work, however, most of the world draws the line at an inappropriately high age. The way I conclude that the age of (most commonly) 18 is in fact too high an age, can be found…

Type “BPA” and “toxic” into Google and you get more than 500,000 results, many detailing how this chemical additive, which is used to strengthen plastics and line metal cans to prevent food poisoning, is disrupting your endocrine system and slowly killing you. It’s in your urine! It’s in your blood! The first Google page is dominated by dire warnings of imminent health catastrophes, some even linking to articles on presumably legitimate websites, such as Newsweek, Mother Jones, Environmental Working Group (EWG) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC): Infertility. Destroys your body…

Though photos are considered more credible, if you are evangelizing a controversial energy type like wind, a cartoon may appear more persuasive.  In a recent study, participants were shown one of two versions of the same set of brochures. Each set was designed to debunk a myth about wind energy, the intent being to give readers desired information about wind energy and assuage their concerns. Each pair of brochures was identical in design, text, color, size, etc. The only difference was that the originally designed brochures featured a beautiful, professional photograph of wind turbines…

Does the reality of mental disorders also cause depression, or is depression a harbinger of other disorders, a gateway as it were? The lack of effective methods for the treatment and prevention of bipolar depression, shortcomings of antidepressant treatment in major depressive disorder, and maintaining treatment adherence are leading therapeutic challenges for modern psychiatry. For decades, there seems to have been a tacit, but highly questionable, assumption that major depressive syndromes are more or less similar clinically and therapeutically, leading to a lack of controlled studies of…

    This content of this blog is adapted from my lecture on Cognitive Bias in Decision Making, for the module Cognition and Emotion. I present this lecture to third year Psychology students at the University of Roehampton, London. The Structure of an Argument How to sort good information from bad! Just like visual illusions, our understanding of the world around us can be incorrect, despite appearing completely accurate or despite our feeling our conclusion must be true because it ‘just feels right’. Knowing we make mistakes about our interpretation of the world is not…