This article originally appeared in Scientific American Mind Recall this pivotal scene from the 1997 movie, Men in Black. James Edwards (Will Smith, or Agent J) arrives at the headquarters of MiB – a secret agency that protects Earth from extraterrestrial threats – to compete with “the best of ...

In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, two friends, Vladimir and Estragon, endlessly wait by a tree in the moonlight for the arrival of someone they both claim to know but neither would recognize – someone named Godot. While they wait, they talk about the Gospels, suicide, the past and the future ...

When the iPhone 5 went on sale users complained that it was too light. This was an odd objection. We prefer light products to heavy ones, especially devices we carry in our pockets. But think about how we metaphorically equate weight with importance, as in the idea weighed on my mind or his ...

The feeling of certainty might be our default setting. We spend most of our mental life confirming our opinions, even when those opinions involve complex issues. We believe we understand the world with detail and coherence, even though our folk theories are usually incomplete. The sad reason ...

What’s the difference between a physician and a surgeon?  If you were sick in the Middle Ages you had three options: the church, the local healer, and the physician. A physician was the most expensive and least effective. If you had a migraine, for example, he would cut you open and bleed you ...

Humans are an optimistic bunch. We overestimate desirable traits (humor), skills (driving) and our future states (well-being and health). Worse, we believe that we are immune to these better-than-average errors, so much so that we are willing to bet small amounts of money in a laboratory setting ...

The human mind likes simplicity. It’s a complicated world, so we filter it into one cohesive and easy-to-digest worldview. This perspective is a rather unscientific one, however. When we observe the world we conclude that we have a pretty good idea of how it works – X will always cause Y – even ...

We imagine our view of the world like a painting from the Realism movement – rife with detail and comprehensible – but the contents of our conscious mind are more like a work of Pop Art, full of abstractions and open to interpretation. The problem, as any MOMA goer will confess, is that it’s ...

The story of discovery goes something like this: the inventor investigates what he knows (the properties of stapholycocci) and uncovers something else (penicillin), which changes the world. The scientific method is one hallmark of the modern era, but sometimes we put too much faith in it. The ...

Today Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel and Behave goes on sale. The author is NYU Assistant Professor of Marketing Adam Alter. I came across Adam's book a few months ago, and after reading the summary I knew I needed to pick up a copy. I contacted Adam and ...

This was originally published on the Scientific American guest blog on February 5th How much does environment influence intelligence? Several years ago University of Virginia Professor Eric Turkheimer demonstrated that growing up in an impoverished and chaotic household suppresses I.Q. – without ...

Consider one last autobiographical note before I answer the question: “How do we avoid the Sartre Fallacy?” I conducted an independent study my senior year that focused on biases and heuristics. I lived in this literature for months, covering what seemed like every study demonstrating how we ...

This brings me to an ancient Greek, the master himself, Socrates of Athens. In a segment of Gorgias that foresees decades of modern psychological research, the erudite interlocutor observes that we always act out of a belief that what we are doing is good. This delusion is self-reinforcing. Time ...

Years before my run in with Monseiur Sartre I landed a summer job in the painting business. If you’ve painted houses perhaps you ran into the same problem I did: poor planning. One summer I discovered that a one week job took closer to two weeks; a three week job lasted about a month and a half ...

Consider the story of my first encounter with Sartre. I read Being and Nothingness in college. The professor, a Nietzsche aficionado, explained Sartre’s adage that existence precedes essence. After two years of ancient philosophy the idea struck me as profound. If it was true, then Plato and ...