A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
There are white lies, there are truly harmful lies, and then there are lies told for the sake of science. Scientists don’t always agree on whether the latter are acceptable, or how often. Many psychology experiments involve lying to participants.
Have you ever wondered if it would be possible to teach a rat to drive? Well, maybe not, but this is the kind of thing psychology researchers think about. In a new study, researchers at University of Richmond let rats
One of the interesting findings in recent psychology research is that relatively simple procedures can temporarily alter people’s brain activity and behaviors. A recent study demonstrated this in terms of people’s propensity for risky actions. The researchers who ran the
If I ask you where you’d put the number 4 in relation to the number 12, chances are you’d put 4 to the left and 12 to the right. Most adults have some form of a mental number line that
The human mind is hard to pin down. It goes where it wants, not necessarily where it’s supposed to, and it’s averse to sitting still. But how much does the mind wander? How much of our time do we spend
Maybe you’ve heard this one: there’s a runaway trolley car headed toward a fork in the tracks. Standing on one set of tracks, oblivious to the trolley car careening out of control, is a group of five people. On the
Creativity can be thought of as a process of breaking down walls between different ideas. Now, a team of researchers in China and the United States have taken that metaphor to entirely new levels by showing that breaking down walls
How many digits can you remember at once? Psychologists refer to this as a digit span test. For example, I might give you a number like 59368572 and ask you to repeat it back to me. Typically, people can hold
Sometimes the best way to make yourself happy is to make others happy. Recently, an international team of researchers made some progress in zeroing in on why this may be the case. In their study, the researchers divided participants up
When people are asked how their abilities stack up against others’, psychologists have noticed a pattern: people tend to rate themselves as above average. Even though, of course, not everyone can be better than average. There are two ways of
