Decisions in the “Trolley Dilemma” Differ From Real-Life Behavior
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...
Knocking Down Walls in Virtual Reality Can Boost Creativity
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...
What Happens After 30 Years of Not Using an Exceptional Memory?
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...
How the Brain Links Generosity and Happiness
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...
The Difficulty of Knowing What “Average” Is
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...
Near Misses Drive Gambling Behavior
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...
Is There a Perfectly Boring Task?
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...
Some Habits Are Harder to Break Than Others
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...
Basketball Players Make More Shots When They Think About Death
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...
Loving Money Makes People Objectify Others
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...
