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Human behavior in a post-rational world
Expectations for the Copenhagen summit next month are dropping like a cartoon anvil. Where once there was talk of a comprehensive international accord on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, now the great global meeting is just a "stepping stone." "We must in the coming weeks focus on what is possible ...
Steven Pinker's attack on Malcolm Gladwell in the New York Times Book Review was more lucid and entertaining than it was intellectually honest. Pinker's take-away claim is that Gladwell's work puts sciencey lipstick on the pig of anti-science "populism": "The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is ...
If you want to see some key symptoms of unconvincing journalism about social science, look no further than this New York Times piece on the effect of unemployment on families. Hallmark Number 1: Duh-uh. Job loss has a psychological effect on families. I did not know that! Hallmark Number 2 ...
Here's a curious study, which reports that "a multivariate logistic regression analysis finds that opera fans are 2.37 times more accepting of suicide because of dishonor than nonfans." The authors think this is because suicide in the name of honor is a theme of many opera plots. They call it the ...
People see what their tools let them see. Case in point: How different the world looks when it's mapped according to unfamiliar principles. Even more striking than a reverse-pole map are these, by the Worldmapper Project, whose maps resize territories according to their relative weights for some ...
Writing for an academic journal? If your prose doesn't sound importantly recondite enough, you could just let this auto-pedant do it for you.
Models of the mind are never ``just theories'' -- ideas about human nature shape the rules and habits that guide daily life. A case in point: If people were purely rational in their decisions about risks and rewards, it would be a simple matter to explain to agricultural workers that all ...
Wrestling with any decisions today? Wondering whether to move to Minnesota or dump that guy or change your Facebook profile picture? Maybe you've also wondered what's going on when you make your choices in life, big and small. Dan Ariely, the behavioral economist and author, is on the case ...
A.N. Wilson, the arch-conservative English litterateur, doesn't like scientists. They are ``gods of certainty'' and people who respect them, he writes today, are responsible for killing most of Britain's cows and sheep and keeping the country's addicts on their drugs and many other bad, bad things ...
So wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. To which Ernest Hemingway replied, ``yes. They have more money.'' Could they one day end up having more fingers? Toes? Brains? The economist Robert Frank wonders about that, picking up on Robert Saffo's suggestion that advances in artificial ...
When Adam Smith wrote that butchers, brewers and bakers worked efficiently out of ``regard for their own interest,'' he was doing more than asserting that self-interest could be good. He was also asserting that self-interest -- a long-lasting, fact-based, explicit sense of ``what's good for me ...
Matthew Hoh thinks there is no good reason. And his opinion is significant, because he is the U.S. Government's Senior Civilian Representive in the Afghan province of Zabul -- or was, until he resigned last month. Here is his letter of resignation, in pdf form, supplied by The New Yorker's ...
Today is the 47th anniversary of the day a courageous Soviet submarine officer, Vasili Arkhipov, probably saved the world from nuclear armageddon. On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, U.S. Navy destroyers were trying to force Arkhipov's submarine to surface near Cuba ...
Biofuel development is going to add a lot more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than previously estimated, according to a new assessment published today in Science Express. In theory, fuel produced from sugar beets, corn or other crops should push less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse ...
After a soccer match, the losers' testosterone levels will probably be lower than the winners' (though it may be that this won't be so if the winners think their victory was a fluke). And among the spectators, even fans of the losers will experience a testosterone drop. Whatever this phenomenon ...