57 posts · 30,830 views
In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. "Mind Matters" is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. And it's about how this change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that rest on the presumption that people act rationally.
David Berreby
57 posts
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- May 13, 2011
- 09:25 AM
- 252 views
Why Creativity Can Be A Problem for Leaders
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
Newt Gingrich, the thinking man's Glenn Beck, is said to be a viable Presidential candidate because he has fresh, creative ideas. Even if you accept that notion at face value, you have to wonder how much of an advantage it will be. As this study (pdf) suggests, people tend to see creativity and ...Read More
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Mueller, J., Goncalo, J., & Kamdar, D. (2011) Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?☆. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(2), 494-498. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.11.010
- March 29, 2011
- 08:01 AM
- 527 views
When Reason Falters, It's Age-Morphing Apps and Virtual Reality to the Rescue
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
The other day I asked for examples of practical post-rationality—changes in law or policy that happened because institutions have stopped assuming that people behave rationally. A number of people wrote in about instances of what Jon Elster calls "precommitment" or "self-binding": Giving up some ...Read More
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Yee, N., Bailenson, J., & Ducheneaut, N. (2009) The Proteus Effect: Implications of Transformed Digital Self-Representation on Online and Offline Behavior. Communication Research, 36(2), 285-312. DOI: 10.1177/0093650208330254
- March 27, 2011
- 11:07 AM
- 522 views
Proof That People Are Prejudiced Against Breast-Feeding Women? Not So Fast
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
This study just out in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin claims to have found a general societal prejudice against women who breast-feed. Reports about the work concurred. But I think it works better as an example of what's wrong with our conceptions of prejudice. It's also good fodder for ...Read More
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Smith, J., Hawkinson, K., & Paull, K. (2011) Spoiled Milk: An Experimental Examination of Bias Against Mothers Who Breastfeed. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. DOI: 10.1177/0146167211401629
Shih, M., Pittinsky, T., & Ambady, N. (1999) Stereotype Susceptibility: Identity Salience and Shifts in Quantitative Performance. Psychological Science, 10(1), 80-83. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.00111
- March 17, 2011
- 12:00 PM
- 405 views
Who's More Likely to Be Right: A Century of Economics Or A Billion Years of Evolution?
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
Advocates of nuclear power have been busy this week, casting choices about reactors as a battle of head versus heart: Emotionally, we're scared and impressed by the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, they say, but the rational choice for the future is to keep licensing those reactors.
As I mentioned ...Read More
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Latty, T., & Beekman, M. (2010) Irrational decision-making in an amoeboid organism: transitivity and context-dependent preferences. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278(1703), 307-312. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1045
- March 14, 2011
- 01:05 PM
- 612 views
Is an Atlantic Tsunami Possible?
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
A lot of people know that New York City sits on fault lines (and that the Indian Point Nuclear Power plant is above the intersection of two active seismic zones), all of which makes it entirely possible that the city could suffer a catastrophic earthquake. But I thought at least I and my fellow ...Read More
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Ward, S., & Day, S. (2001) Cumbre Vieja Volcano—Potential collapse and tsunami at La Palma, Canary Islands. Geophysical Research Letters, 28(17), 3397. DOI: 10.1029/2001GL013110
- March 12, 2011
- 10:19 AM
- 625 views
The Longer You Live, the Worse You Drive
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
Research on life extension is all about aging and death within a human body. Perhaps it should expand to encompass the effects of being run over by a car: According to this study, elderly drivers are half as likely to notice hazards and pedestrians as are younger drivers. So if we ever attain a ...Read More
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Bromberg, S., Oron-Gilad, T., Ronen, A., Borowsky, A., & Parmet, Y. (2011) The perception of pedestrians from the perspective of elderly experienced and experienced drivers. Accident Analysis . DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2010.12.028
- February 15, 2011
- 09:23 AM
- 734 views
Why You Can't Cure a Plague of Olbermanns With An Infusion of O'Reillys
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
Do left-leaning social sciences need an influx of conservatives to open their collective minds? So argues Jon Haidt, but I wonder. As I read this study in this month's Journal of Risk Research, adding another ideology to social psychology would more likely lead to a lot of pointless yelling and a ...Read More
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Kahan, D., Jenkins-Smith, H., & Braman, D. (2011) Cultural cognition of scientific consensus. Journal of Risk Research, 14(2), 147-174. DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2010.511246
- February 9, 2011
- 02:58 PM
- 550 views
Is Social Science Flying Around in Circles, Using Only Its Left Wing?
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
What's the matter with social psychology? Everybody in social science (including social psychology itself) has a diagnosis, because everybody thinks something is amiss ("it's a terrible field," an anthropologist once told me). As John Tierney reported on Monday, Jonathan Haidt of the University of ...Read More
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Krueger JI, & Funder DC. (2004) Towards a balanced social psychology: causes, consequences, and cures for the problem-seeking approach to social behavior and cognition. The Behavioral and brain sciences, 27(3), 313. PMID: 15736870
- February 6, 2011
- 01:35 PM
- 455 views
Study: When Your Super Bowl Team Goes Down, Your Death Risk Goes Up
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
The link between Super Bowls and heart failure is usually written in guacamole and beer. But we are a social species, whose feelings about group identity have a direct impact on health, via the brain-body connection. Hence this study in this month's Clinical Cardiology, which says death rates in ...Read More
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Kloner, R., McDonald, S., Leeka, J., & Poole, W. (2011) Role of Age, Sex, and Race on Cardiac and Total Mortality Associated With Super Bowl Wins and Losses. Clinical Cardiology. DOI: 10.1002/clc.20876
- January 27, 2011
- 08:03 AM
- 403 views
Study: A Complete Stranger Understands You About as Well as Your Spouse Does
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
If you say "it's snowing hard out there," are you annoyed if no one gets up to shovel the walkway? Vexed, are you, by your intimates' inability to see what you meant? Do you think a long love's result should be near-wordless mind-reading? If so, here is some advice derived from the current issue of ...Read More
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Savitsky, K., Keysar, B., Epley, N., Carter, T., & Swanson, A. (2011) The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(1), 269-273. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.09.005
- January 26, 2011
- 02:18 PM
- 423 views
What the Tiger Mother Left Out
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
A cognitive scientist friend of mine made a good point the other day about Amy Chua's assertion that "nothing is fun until you're good at it." It is, he said (and I should have seen right away) not true. Lots of things are fun before you're good at them. Potching around with a guitar or a tennis ...Read More
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Chiu, M., & Klassen, R. (2010) Relations of mathematics self-concept and its calibration with mathematics achievement: Cultural differences among fifteen-year-olds in 34 countries. Learning and Instruction, 20(1), 2-17. DOI: 10.1016/j.learninstruc.2008.11.002
- January 20, 2011
- 07:06 PM
- 511 views
Study: Your Genes Help Pick Your Friends
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
How much of you resides between your ears? And how much of what you call "me" is made outside your body, in your relationships with others? Biologists have largely confined themselves to aspects of the mind that can be measured in a single human body (galvanic skin response, activity in the amygdala ...Read More
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Fowler, J., Settle, J., & Christakis, N. (2011) Correlated genotypes in friendship networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1011687108
- January 11, 2011
- 02:50 PM
- 511 views
Chinese Mothers, American Anxieties and the Nature of Parenting
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
Over the weekend I read Amy Chua's paean to "Chinese parents" in The Wall Street Journal with morbid fascination. What felt morbid was Chua's "Mommie Dearest" anecdote about battling with her 7-year-old because the little girl couldn't master a difficult piano piece (which involved threatening to ...Read More
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QUINN, N. (2003) Cultural Selves. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1001(1), 145-176. DOI: 10.1196/annals.1279.010
- January 4, 2011
- 11:09 PM
- 629 views
Study: To Improve Your Score, Try a Little Pre-Test Ancestor Worship
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
I admit I was creeped out by this new paper, from the European Journal of Social Psychology, which reports that people primed to think about their ancestors performed better on intelligence tests than did people who didn't. I'm just a little squicked that a study performed in Austria commends pride ...Read More
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Fischer, P., Sauer, A., Vogrincic, C., & Weisweiler, S. (2010) The ancestor effect: Thinking about our genetic origin enhances intellectual performance. European Journal of Social Psychology. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.778
MCGLONE, M., & ARONSON, J. (2006) Stereotype threat, identity salience, and spatial reasoning. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 27(5), 486-493. DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2006.06.003
Cohen, G. (2006) Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap: A Social-Psychological Intervention. Science, 313(5791), 1307-1310. DOI: 10.1126/science.1128317
Miyake, A., Kost-Smith, L., Finkelstein, N., Pollock, S., Cohen, G., & Ito, T. (2010) Reducing the Gender Achievement Gap in College Science: A Classroom Study of Values Affirmation. Science, 330(6008), 1234-1237. DOI: 10.1126/science.1195996
- January 1, 2011
- 08:35 PM
- 541 views
Study: Sugar Pills Heal People Who Believe They Will Work
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
In a technology-based culture, you learn from infancy that truth is what can be counted and measured. That makes it easy to divide any conversation into what you learned (important!) and how you learned it (immaterial). What your medical tests reveal is vital; how your doctor tells you, her "bedside ...Read More
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Kaptchuk, T., Friedlander, E., Kelley, J., Sanchez, M., Kokkotou, E., Singer, J., Kowalczykowski, M., Miller, F., Kirsch, I., & Lembo, A. (2010) Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome. PLoS ONE, 5(12). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015591
- December 30, 2010
- 09:25 AM
- 533 views
How Much Pain is Our Kid Feeling? Well, How Much Can We Afford?
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
When a sick kid is too young to speak, doctors naturally ask a parent or other caretaker how much it hurts. Only half of the answer, according to this study in this month's Journal of Pain, is based on symptoms. The rest arises from the adult's own life experience, including social class: Given a ...Read More
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Shaikh, N., Kearney, D., Colborn, D., Balentine, T., Feng, W., Lin, Y., & Hoberman, A. (2010) How Do Parents of Preverbal Children With Acute Otitis Media Determine How Much Ear Pain Their Child Is Having?. The Journal of Pain, 11(12), 1291-1294. DOI: 10.1016/j.jpain.2010.03.017
- December 29, 2010
- 04:03 PM
- 622 views
Using Google to Tell Real Science from Fads
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
Most hot ideas and discoveries fade with time. But some scientific papers are genuine breakthroughs, whose importance only increases as the decades pass. This one, published in Science last week, which describes a database of words from millions of books digitized by Google—4 percent of all books ...Read More
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Michel, J., Shen, Y., Aiden, A., Veres, A., Gray, M., , ., Pickett, J., Hoiberg, D., Clancy, D., Norvig, P.... (2010) Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1199644
Fanelli, D. (2010) “Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences. PLoS ONE, 5(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010068
- December 23, 2010
- 09:08 PM
- 614 views
Three Cheers for Failure!
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
Last week I vowed to pay more attention to replication in psychology experiments. Repeated experiments are an important test of whether a finding is "really out there" or an accident, so, as a number of psychologists have been saying lately to the public, it is kind of a problem that many ...Read More
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Jennifer V. Fayard, Amandeep K. Bassi, Daniel M. Bernstein, & Brent W. Roberts. (2009) Is cleanliness next to godliness? Dispelling old wives’ tales: Failure to replicate Zhong and Liljenquist (2006). Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis, 6(2), 21-29. info:other/1539-8714
Zhong CB, & Liljenquist K. (2006) Washing away your sins: threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science (New York, N.Y.), 313(5792), 1451-2. PMID: 16960010
- December 21, 2010
- 11:14 PM
- 501 views
How Strong Are Your Relationships? Drop a Few Mails Into This Analyzer, and Get an Estimate
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
"Most people are other people," Oscar Wilde wrote. "Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." You get the feeling, somehow, that he thought this was a bad thing. Seems likelier that it's just an inevitable fact about a species whose members ...Read More
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Ireland, M., & Pennebaker, J. (2010) Language style matching in writing: Synchrony in essays, correspondence, and poetry. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(3), 549-571. DOI: 10.1037/a0020386
Stephens, G., Silbert, L., & Hasson, U. (2010) Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1008662107
- December 17, 2010
- 04:57 PM
- 555 views
Of Political Orgasms and the Scientific Method
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
This week's theme is epistemological unease in the sciences: Complaints in a number of disciplines that studies didn't really find the effects they're reporting. One reason for these worries is that many studies nowadays are never repeated. So today I'm going to consciously and rationally resist ...Read More
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Phillips, D., Kanter, E., Bednarczyk, B., & Tastad, P. (1991) Importance of the Lay Press in the Transmission of Medical Knowledge to the Scientific Community. New England Journal of Medicine, 325(16), 1180-1183. DOI: 10.1056/NEJM199110173251620
Markey, P., & Markey, C. (2010) Changes in pornography-seeking behaviors following political elections: an examination of the challenge hypothesis. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(6), 442-446. DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.06.004
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