Psychology

As hard as it is to believe, I've been at this blogging thing for 12 years now. In fact, it's been so long that this year I didn't even remember to mention it when it happened nearly two weeks ago. Over that time period, I've dealt with a large number of conspiracy theories. Indeed, skeptics can't help but avoid it. After all, conspiracy theories are at the heart of a lot of pseudoscience, quackery, and crankery. For instance, the very first bit of pseudohistory that served as my "gateway drug" into skepticism, Holocaust denial, is based upon a massive conspiracy theory that the Jews made up…

A disproportionate percentage of Islamist radical actors, including suicide bombers, come from an engineering background. Why? Right wing and Islamist extremism seem to share this and other traits, while left wing extremism is more commonly associated with individuals from the humanities and social sciences. This is what we learn from "Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education", by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog. An obvious reason that engineers may be more often associated with groups that carry out bombings is that such groups recruit engineers…

I met a student, I was on his examining committee, who had been a civil engineer for years (he was getting his undergraduate degree late in life). He was politically conservative and cynical about academia. He needed the degree in order to get a major promotion, hated the idea of going back to college, but he held his nose and did it anyway. Part of the examination process involved asking the student how the completed degree program had changed is life. In this student’s case, one might expect the answer to have focused on the simple fact of getting a doubling in salary and promotion to the…

My house is near an LSS housing unit. Lagen om stöd och service till vissa funktionshindrade, "The Law of Support and Service for Certain Disabled People", mainly caters to the needs of people with autism and the like. In 6½ years on Boat Hill, the young people living there have never caused us any trouble at all. But I still cringe a little when I recall my phone conversation with the man who runs the municipality's LSS housing units. I called him because I was curious about who the young folks living next door are, what diagnoses they have etc. I made it very clear that I was not afraid of…

I'm weeks late to the party here. If you pay attention to atheist issues you've probably heard that a recent major meta-study* concludes that at the population level, atheists are a bit smarter than religious folks (mainly Protestant Americans and English in this case). Not dramatically so, but in a statistically significant way. The difference persists even if you control for gender and education level. This means that if you look only at poorly educated people, the unbelievers are a bit smarter, and likewise if you look only at highly educated people, or women, or men. Here are some…

Ferdinand Balfoort contributes a guest entry upon a recent ancestral pilgrimage to Stockholm. I gladly agreed to write something for the blog after being introduced by Martin to a book by Frans G. Bengtsson about Early Modern Scottish brigades (and brigadiers) in the Nordic region including Sweden. I visited Stockholm in December on my quest to find my 16th century ancestor Gilbert Balfour who lost his head during a public decapitation procedure with a sharp implement, somewhere in the Old Town. So far I am no closer to retrieving his head or his grave site, but some illumination has been…

Alcoholic Anonymous founder Bill Wilson put forth the controversial idea of using LSD, yes, LSD to reduce alcohol abuse. Is there any scientific evidence for this? Published today in the Journal of Psycholpharmacology, researchers took a careful look at a wide range of studies ("meta-analysis") and concluded: ...repeated doses of LSD - for example, weekly or monthly - might elicit more sustained effects on alcohol misuse than a single dose of LSD. And: Of 536 participants in six trials, 59% of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to 38% of people who…

Is that Jesus looking into a mirror? A recent study shows that Christian conservatives and liberals reflect themselves upon the image of Jesus, and it's not an ordinary mirror. Below is an excerpt from their Abstract: The present study explores the dramatic projection of one's own views onto those of Jesus among conservative and liberal American Christians. In a large-scale survey, the relevant views that each group attributed to a contemporary Jesus differed almost as much as their own views. Despite such dissonance-reducing projection, however, conservatives acknowledged the relevant…

My colleague Prof. Mark Boguski at the Harvard Medical School shared a provocative quote: True? Not all psychopaths are in prison. Some are in the Boardroom. Over at MedPageToday, they just completed an intriguing and informative series of articles about the psychology of psychopaths. According to Prof. Boguski: ...our 3-part series on psychopathy just concluded yesterday on MedPageToday. Here's a summary of some of our tweets about it: WANTED: Charming, aggressive, carefree people who are good at looking out for #1 http://bit.ly/kmj5oM Also... Corporate psychopaths: the sour cream…

What do Americans regret the most? Regret can weigh you down, leading to focusing on the past rather than a brighter future. Each of us has a bundle of regrets; I will spare you my own list - it is unlikely you have the time or interest to lend a sympathetic ear. What's on your list? Researchers at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University set out to answer this question by surveying a randomized sample of adult men and women across the U.S. How did they do the study? A total of 370 adult Americans (207 were women) completed a survey via telephone (in exchange for $5; mailed…

A bunch of people I follow on social media were buzzing about this blog post yesterday, taking Jonah Lerher to task for "getting spun" in researching and writing this column in the Wall Street Journal about this paper on the "wisdom of crowds" effect. The effect in question is a staple of pop psychology these days, and claims that an aggregate of many guesses by people with little or no information will often turn out to be a very reasonable estimate of the true value. The new paper aims to show the influence of social effects, and in particular, that providing people with information about…

A little while back, Jonah Lehrer did a nice blog post about reasoning that used the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky, The Hot Hand in Basketball (PDF link) as an example of a case where people don't want to believe scientific results. The researchers found absolutely no statistical evidence of "hot" shooting-- a player who had made his previous couple of shots was, if anything, slightly less likely to make the next one. Lehrer writes: Why, then, do we believe in the hot hand? Confirmation bias is to blame. Once a player makes two shots in a row - an utterly unremarkable event…

YOUR brain has a remarkable ability to extract and process biological cues from the deluge of visual information. It is highly sensitive to the movements of living things, especially those of other people - so much so that it conjures the illusion of movement from a picture of a moving body. Although static, such pictures trigger dynamic representations of the body, 'motor images' containing information about movement kinematics and timing. Researchers at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London now show that biological motion is processed unconsciously, and that the speed of…

When everyone thought extrasensory perception had disappeared into the same embarrassing past as phrenology it came back with a vengeance. In a recent article by Daryl Bem titled Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect evidence was presented that some have found very hard to ignore. Others have completely trashed the experimental methods and statistics (obviously... it IS science after all). There are a number of available pdf's of both the article and the commentary floating around the internet if you do a google search.…

And you can too! All you have to do is win this gorilla costume. This is guaranteed to work in a women's locker room*. I can't vouch for its success rate in men's locker rooms since.. well... I don't really have to sneak in there. Anyway, all you have to do to have a chance of winning this amazing gorilla suit is to pre-order the new paper back version of Dan Simons' and Chris Chabris' book The Invisible Gorilla. If you're not into sick horrible ideas like sneaking into locker rooms (because clearly, that is the only thing you could possibly do with that costume) you could also pre-order…

I was digging through some of my old blog posts and had almost totally forgot about this artwork I commissioned for the blog when I first started back on blogger. Check it out and then I'll fill you in on what I've been up to and why I've been so sparse over the last many months. I stopped blogging consistently a while back, and it was for a great reason, I promise! About a year ago, after I passed my prelims, I went on the job market. I interviewed for a couple academic positions (mainly liberal arts) and a number of industry/government jobs. I finally decided to 'sell out' and take the…

Or forced perspective. I suspect this is more sensitive to viewpoint than the previous post. -via BoingBoing-

LOOK at the photograph on the right. Does it show the face of a man or a woman? There's no right answer - the photo has been manipulated to look sexually ambiguous and can be perceived as either. But according to a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science, the sense of touch can influence how you perceive and categorize the face. Last year a team of European psychologists found that bodily movements alter the recollection of emotional memories, and an American group showed that the sense of touch influences social judgements and decisions. The new study adds to the growing…

There's a great blog called ionpsych being run by Dan Simons (of Invisible Gorilla fame). The posts are all by graduate students in a science writing for public consumption class. I'm glad people are starting to teach us overly technical scientists how to communicate in graduate school. I'm not aware of any other class out there dedicated to teaching psychology and neuroscience students how to best communicate their ideas to the world. Anyway, here's one of my favorite posts from Audrey Lustig: How do people judge fashion design? Fashion experts are notorious for using vague criteria,…

Have I dominated you yet? This is why I walk around staring at people - World Domination. For the study, participants watched a computer screen while a series of colored ovals appeared. Below each oval were blue, green, and red dots; they were supposed to look away from the oval to the dot with the same color. What they didn't know was that for a split-second before the colored oval appeared, a face of the same color appeared, with either an angry, happy, or neutral expression. So the researchers were testing how long it took for people to look away from faces with different emotions.…