Psychology

What Do Sex Dolls And Cell Phones Have In Common?

Julie Beck’s latest feature for The Atlantic is chock-full of all the salacious factoids one expects from an article titled “A (Straight, Male) History of Sex Dolls.” Above: “Sandy sex doll or poseable mannequin” | Photo Credit: Dollist | CC BY-SA 3.0 For instance: There is an urban legend that Hitler had sex dolls designed…

You Could Wake Up Convinced You’re In a Duplicate World

Or, at least, that you’re in a duplicate town, house, and hospital. Reduplicative paramnesia victims believe that someone or something has constructed a duplicate structure, that looks exactly like the one they remember being in. What part of the brain can make you think you’re on the set of your own life? One day, a…

Superstition Might Be Practical In Some Circumstances

Here’s some research which shows that, while superstitious behavior won’t stop events from happening, it does have practical value to people. It won’t stop bad things from happening to you – but it may stop you from feeling bad things. Would you hop on a free flight to Aruba? I’m guessing you would. Now, what…

White Lies Make Social Networks Stronger. Selfish Lies Tear Them Apart.

“Lying is a bad thing – this is what mentors, parents and teachers tell us. But there is no society without lies.” Photo Credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg, CC BY-SA So says theoretical physicist Rafael Barrio, and when he and his colleague Kimmo Kaski from the Aalto University School of Science in Finland thought about this…

How Can Two Studies Say Cleanliness Makes You More And Less Forgiving?

I love it when I find studies with results that directly contradict each other. In this case, two studies on how handwashing affects moral judgment draw two completely opposite conclusions. So it’s kind of fitting that we judge them! The Lady Macbeth Effect has been noted in multiple scientific studies. When people feel a sense…

Long-Term Couples Develop Interconnected Memory Systems

New research from Macquarie University in Australia reveals that intimate couples become part of an interpersonal cognitive system where each is dependent on the other to fill in certain memory gaps. On the face of it, it seems obvious that we should work with other people when trying to recall shared information. But research shows…

Why Songs Get Stuck in Your Head (and How to Stop It)

Whether yours is “Call Me Maybe,” “Who Let the Dogs Out,” “Mickey,” or something equally infectious, at one time or another, you’ve probably had a fragment from a catchy (or obnoxious) tune stuck in your head. Where Do Sticky Songs Come From? Due to the involuntary nature of songs getting stuck in people’s heads, it…

The Experiment That Makes People Face Up to Their Moral Hypocrisy

Here’s a delicious little experiment that give us a look at the seedy immorality of its research participants. No, it’s not the Milgram Experiment or the Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s as simple as a coin toss. A group of people are brought in for an experiment, and asked to choose from one of two different…

You’ll probably have a better day if you strike up a conversation with a stranger on the bus or train. New psychological research shows that commuters mostly believed that talking to strangers would make their journeys worse, but discovered after doing it that it almost always made them better.

Good TV Could Be Making You Eat Too Much

One of the visual codes for engrossing television is viewers sitting frozen with their spoons of ice cream half-way to their mouths. It seems like a great show might make you stop eating because you concentrate. Turns out that great television actually makes you eat more because you concentrate. In a one-time survey, 120 people…

A charitable foundation has just donated $650 million to the Broad Institute, earmarked for psychiatric research. It is the largest such donation ever made, and is welcome in an era when we’re seeing a decline in funding for the study of mental illness.

Injustice And Lies Are The Way To Solve Our Hatred Of Waiting In Line

Everyone hates waiting in line. It’s boring, it’s annoying, and you actively feel your life slipping away as you do it. You might think the solution to this problem would be common courtesy and fair play. You’d be wrong. Turns out there’s an entire field of research called “queuing theory.” Some of it is innocuous,…

What Did Doctors Learn By Scaring Toddlers in the “Risk Room”?

Remember the twisted experiment to see what happens when kids think they’ve broken a treasured toy? The doctor in charge of that study also studied children’s responses to a creepy “Risk Room.” Their behavior in the room revealed surprising things about the child’s future behavior. https://gizmodo.com/the-messed-up-experiment-meant-to-induce-crippling-guil-1606447630 Toddler Personality Types What do you learn about a…

Car Dealers Use the “Defense in Depth” Strategy to Wear You Down

At one point or another, most people will have to be in some kind of negotiation for a big ticket item. The most notorious of these negotiations is the car. Car salesmen have become famous for their underhanded negotiation tactics. There is an actual name for one strategy that car dealerships (and other unscrupulous types)…

Religious Kids Are More Likely To Think Magical Protagonists Are Real

Results from a study published in the latest issue of Cognitive Science suggest that 5- and 6-year-old kids from religious backgrounds judge fact from fiction differently than those with non-religious upbringings. Photo Credit: ex_magician via flickr | CC BY 2.0 Unsurprisingly, when children were presented stories that depicted “ordinarily impossible events brought about by divine…

Why City-Dwellers Don’t Evacuate In Emergencies

After major urban disasters, there are always stories about the stubborn people who refused to evacuate. They’ve survived incredible danger, or worse, they haven’t survived at all. But this isn’t because they’re foolhardy. There are good reasons that people stay in their homes, to protect their property at all costs. Photo by Aaron Favila/AP Aurora…

The Messed-Up Experiment Meant To Induce Crippling Guilt In Children

Do you know when children start to feel guilt? Scientists at the University of Iowa do, because of this little experiment. They gave children a toy, told them that the toy was very special to them, and asked the child to be extremely careful with it. Then the toy broke. The toy, usually a doll…

A controversial new study suggests we choose our friends because they share our genes. An analysis of nearly 2,000 people shows that our friends are as genetically similar to us as our fourth cousins. But critics say other factors could affect the results, such as ethnicity or other types of population stratification.

This Is Why I Love Your Selfies

I’m not really into taking pictures of myself, but I love seeing your selfies. I don’t care whether you’re posing with some weird food item or standing next to that guy who kind of annoys me. That’s because your Snapchat pic of a barf face is fulfilling an ancient biological urge that I share with…

Why Do You Always End Up In The Slowest Line?

Mathematicians have confirmed what you, in your heart of hearts, have long suspected: The odds of picking the quickest line really are stacked against you. Over at Wired, Adam Mann is taking a look at the elements of queueing theory that explain just why it’s so hard to pick the quickest moving line in the…