Luck vs Merit (Part 2)
/Robert Frank discusses the role of skill vs. luck in producing success.
Read MoreWriting: Blog
Inescapable Karma
/Simultaneously disbelieving karma and “sort of believing it” may be a logical contradiction, but in reality it’s actually very common for people to be “of two minds” when it comes to these sorts of magical beliefs. While some people endorse karma without reservation, many of us would reject the notion that the universe is governed by laws of moral cause and effect, but we often still behave as if we believed it.
Read MoreJust Post It (update)
/An update on Simonsohn's recently posted paper in which I discuss one of the techniques used to confirm Simonsohn's suspicions of fraud. The results of the analysis make it clear that the data was not generated by real subjects.
Read MoreJust My Luck (or is it?)
/Most people agree that success requires hard work and good fortune. Recent research suggests that people's politics can be swayed depending on which of these ingredients they focus on when thinking about their own success. Thinking about the role of hard work in your success makes you more likely to support more conservative social policies, while thinking about the role of luck and the help of others makes you more likely to support liberal ones.
Read MorePsychology is Science
/Some guy thinks psychology is not really a science. He doesn't know what he's talking about.
Read MoreThe Public Benefits of Social Psychology
/Two recent editorials by Dick Thaler and Tim Wilson make a strong case for the public benefits of social psychology.
Read MoreCrimes and Misdemeanors: Reforming Social Psychology
/Is social psychology in need of reform? I propose that despite high profile cases of fraud, we should be more focused on fixing the mistakes that honest researchers make all the time.
Read MoreAdapting to Change
/Some really interesting ideas from biologist Razib Khan (@razibkhan) on political ideology at his Gene Expression blog. The basic idea is that the degree to which people think for themselves, rather than simply do what everyone else is doing and has always done, depends on how quickly the world around them is changing.
Read MoreRationalization and the Individual Mandate
/Washington Post reporter Ezra Klein has a thoughtful piece in The New Yorker this week that walks through the psychology and politics of how Republicans pulled a 180-degree turn in their position on the individual healthcare mandate. Klein’s argument revolves around several of the forms of motivated reasoning that I’ve discussed here over the past few weeks, including how partisans reflexively dislike whatever their opponent proposes and how we construct our ideals of fairness based on whatever suits our current purposes.
Read MoreForget about Fairness
/Building on my post last week that highlighted how compromise becomes difficult when people think there’s more distance between them and the other side than there actually is, I wanted to pass along a recent column by James Surowiecki on the “fairness trap”.
Read MoreExtremists Exaggerate Polarization
/Political polarization is not as bad as most people think. New psychological research on "polarization projection" reveals that people on the extremes have a tendency to project the strength of their beliefs on others, creating a distorted picture of the political landscape.
Read MoreWe're not Zombies
/My thoughts on an interesting article by Alva Noe about how automatic thought and decision making enables us to give our full attention to what really matters.
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- The New York Times
May 1st, 2015