A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
It’s sometimes said that wisdom is about knowing what you don’t know. If that’s the case, then the opposite of wisdom must be what psychologists sometimes call naive realism – a tendency to believe that one’s personal view of the
From white lies to more malicious fibs, people bend or hide the truth for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons, it turns out, is that sometimes the truth is so fantastical that other people wouldn’t even believe it.
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
