Chris Paley | Psychology

Apr 11, 2020
4 min

Risk vs pleasure in a pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic forces us to make an unsavoury calculation that most of us perform without realising. What is a life worth: how...

Mar 7, 2020
3 min

If you pay people less, they like their job more

Imagine that you’d agreed to take part in an experiment on factors affecting task performance. For the first half-hour, you put twelve...

Mar 25, 2019
2 min

Why is talking to yourself mad but talking to your computer normal?

The most powerful technique we have for predicting what other objects will do is the invention of minds. We endow those things with...

Mar 2, 2019
3 min

We care more about one person than a hundred

Giving money to charity makes us feel good. When we decide to give money, the same part of our brain is active which responds when we...

Feb 10, 2019
2 min

The bigger the crime, the more likely we are to find someone guilty

When we judge somebody, it’s not sufﬁcient for us to know that they’ve caused harm; we also think it’s important to ﬁnd out whether they...

About Chris

Chris has an MSci and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Unthink and Beyond Bad. His books have been published in six languages and described as 'fun', 'thought provoking', 'astonishingly original', 'exceptionally well written', 'startling' and 'hard to ignore' by leading scientists, philosophers and writers.