[Note 5/24/12: I’m away from the desk this week. This post originally ran on February 28, 2011, and stirred a lot of online discussion; still fully current, and I suspect will be so for a while.] Is cognitive science full of crap? A biophyics researcher recently asked this of a cognitive science researcher. The […]
Continue reading →A couple years ago, David Pizarro, a young research psychologist at Cornell, brewed up a devious variation on the classic trolley problem. The trolley problem is that staple of moral psychology studies at dinner parties in which you ask someone to decide under what conditions it’s morally permissible to kill one person to save others. […]
Continue reading →Author’s note: This story originally appeared in Scientific American, April 2009. As the suggestion of U.S. Army medical student Petulant Skeptic (see below), I am re-publishing it here, open access, because the return of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars renews the importance of examining our ideas about how most soldiers react to combat. As […]
Continue reading →In a passage highlighted by Flip Chart Fairy Tales, Stephen Pinker, in an interview in The Observer last week, argues that statistical ignorance is our intellectual culture’s great failure. I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. Cognitive psychology tells us that the […]
Continue reading →Author’s: This post is an expansion of a feature I published a few weeks ago in New Scientist. It draws from research for a book I’m now writing, The Orchid and the Dandelion (Crown; ETA 2015). I originally explored this subject, at more length (and with monkeys) in a November 2009 Atlantic article, “Orchid Children.” A few years ago, […]
Continue reading →The answer is apparently to be more like Anthony Shadid, the extraordinary war reporter who died last week in Syria. Here’s a remembrance of him in The Atlantic from Thanassis Cambanis, a friend and fellow journalist: Anthony Shadid never seemed to be in a hurry. If you needed him, or simply wanted his company, he would linger […]
Continue reading →This guest post is by biologist and writer Emily Willingham, who first published it yesterday at The Biology Files. I asked her if I could post it here because it speaks to the importance of writing about behavioral science in a way that draws on data carefully rather than casually or by convenience to one’s argument; an […]
Continue reading →As faithful readers know, I’m working on a book, provisionally titled The Orchid and the Dandelion and likely to be published next year, about the orchid-dandelion hypothesis: the notion that genes and traits that underlie some of humans’ biggest weaknesses — despair, madness, savage aggression — also underlie some of our greatest strengths — resilience, lasting happiness, […]
Continue reading →Deep Intellect, a Sy Montgomery piece at Orion, is one of the best things I’ve read in a while: The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her […]
Continue reading →Some of my favs from the last week or so. The photo above sums the dilemma explored in Seeing the Monkey in the Mirror: It’s not just the monkey in the mirror: It’s people looking at monkeys looking at themselves in a mirror that the person holds. A nice meta-level look at this self-recognition paradigm by @SrsMonkeyBiz, […]
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