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Human behavior in a post-rational world
Last week, the last vestiges of the pop-science writer Jonah Lehrer's journalistic respectability evaporated. Wired, which had stuck with him through a summer of revelations about his self-borrowing, plagiarism and fabrications, decided to "sever the relationship." The trigger was a devastating ...
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James Taranto is a Wall Street Journal writer now internationally famous as a self-important jerk because of this tweet yesterday about the Aurora killings: "I hope the girls whose boyfriends died to save them were worthy of the sacrifice." Like most people who saw it, I thought this was an ...
The notion of "painful news" is a common metaphor, but this Israeli study suggests there might be literal truth in the cliché. In a study of chronic-pain patients, it found that those who reported increased suffering were likely to share a common trait: They had watched a lot of news about a recent ...
Science rests on the assumption that the world can be known: that causes have effects, and logic applied on Thursday in Katmandu is valid still on Friday in Geneva. Psychology, and its claims to be a science, rest on the assumption that people can be known, in the same way we know about chemical ...
In his superb essay about his years as a Mormon (one of the best pieces about faith I have read in a long time) Walter Kirn notes that he said he fell away from the LDS because he didn't believe. But it was really because he didn't want to give up so much time. It was, he writes, "[t]oo much ...
In pursuit of the biological basis of morality, researchers are interested in an area of the brain at the boundary of the right temporal lobe and the right parietal lobe (very roughly, it's located maybe 2 inches above the midpoint of a line between your right eyebrow and your right ear, not that I ...
Last night I heard Fred Guterl talk about his cheery new book, The Fate of the Species , which describes various ways we could do ourselves in, including heating up the world past habitability, accidentally evolving a virus that wipes us out, obliterating the plants and animals we need to survive ...
Anne-Marie Slaughter's new piece in The Atlantic about how women cannot "have it all" has provoked a wave of commentary, but none that I have seen has mentioned the article's clearest, if unstated, point. It is right there, in the opening: Slaughter, a former high State Department official, begins ...
OK, so I thought I was alone in this, and that it was due to incipient neural disorders or too many drugs back in the 80s, but no: It turns out many other people, like me, feel the sensation of their cell phone vibrating when it has not. Matt Soniak looks at what's known about this curious ...
"Self-plagiarism" is the grandiose new term for the re-use of one's own words in several journalistic articles, for which Jonah Lehrer became famous last week. Lehrer's problems then expanded to include multiple accusations that he has presented other writers' reporting as if it were his own—not ...
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Right after my recent post on "psychopunditry," I came across signs of this kerfuffle between the writer Jonah Lehrer and the psychologist Christopher Chabris (not to be confused with this other kerfuffle). Short version: Chabris thinks Lehrer exaggerates the reach and meaning of research findings ...
Feeling threatened changes people's perceptions of other people. Before World War II, for example, American university students described the Japanese as artistic and progressive, while the Chinese were supposedly treacherous and deceitful. By 1943, those stereotypes were reversed—just as American ...
Once upon a time, we were taught that people are basically rational—at least when they have to be, at the stock market, the voting booth, the courtroom, the hospital, the school, the employment office and other important places. Economists, in particular, depended on their version (rationality ...
Struggling with a foreign language is practically the definition of mental strain: what is the word for "screwdriver" again? did I produce that "ĥ" sound correctly? are they laughing with me or at me? And mental strain, according to post-rational theories of the mind, has consequences for how we ...
Responding to my post the other day (about the claim that entitlement programs discourage people from having kids) Ramesh Ponnuru replies here with the fair point that cultural differences among nations mean that you can't expect a perfect correlation between generosity of social program and ...