A blog about human brains and behavior for students of psychology.
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
One of the paradoxes of gambling is that losing can make people want to keep playing as much as winning. All losses are not created equal, though. Several studies published recently in the Journal of Gambling Studies suggest that near
Boredom research is a fairly popular area of study in psychology recently. It’s not to be confused with boring research because it can give us some interesting insights into how people work, which is one reason I’ve written about it
Our lives are full of habits, healthy and unhealthy, big and small. Sometimes we don’t even realize how deeply ingrained some of our regular behaviors are until we try to break them. According to a new study from researchers at
Here are two things you might not think to put together: basketball and contemplating the human condition. But put them together is exactly what researchers from University of Arizona did in a paper called He Dies, He Shoots: Evidence That
Here are the only two things you really need to know about money: Our society is based on money. Money doesn’t always bring out the best in people. Put these together, and you can see why money causes all sorts
