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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 muc...

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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 sp...

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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 belie...

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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 re...

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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 ...

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What are people's biggest regrets in life?

The life not lived can be more vivid than the life we do live. What if I’d married Katie or Suzie instead of Charlotte? What if I’d studi...

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Arguments are used for defending choices, not making them

We don’t have conscious access to our real decision-making processes. But we do have access to a model which is very good at explaining o...

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How the hand sees what your eye can't

As a child, if not more recently, you’ll have seen the Ebbinghaus illusion. When a circle is surrounded by other, much smaller, circles i...

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You hear with your eyes and see with your ears

It is common knowledge that we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, taste with our tongue and smell with our nose. But it isn’t true. I...

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How your friends change what you buy

Without being paid, other people promote brands to us everyday. Our friends might wear T-shirts bearing a little man riding a horse. Our ...

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We do what we imagine others do, even though we know what others do is wrong

Sometimes our understanding of people is so ﬂawed that our attempts to change what they do have the opposite effect. In Arizona, there is...

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If you think you’ll always be alone it’s more likely to happen

Being single is bad for you, and expecting to remain single is bad for the people around you. Apart from the unpleasant feeling of being ...

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Being good makes us bad

When we're caught doing wrong, we try to make amends and restore others' good opinion of us. But what about when we're already in moral ...

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Do reasons or decisions come first?

The best psychologists are good at deceiving their subjects. If volunteers cotton on to what a study is really about, some of them say an...

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We like things more the more we see them

Most of us are fortunate enough to be surrounded by things we like. There has to be something wrong with the man who lives with pictures ...

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Are you rich enough to be bad?

The rich have it all to lose; you'd expect them to follow the rules. But here's how they don't... The less well-off realise they have mo...

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Evil is more interesting than good

In the news today, as every day, you’ll find lying politicians, racist attacks, rapes, murders, environmental ruin, wars and nuclear bomb...

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Nonsense makes you smarter

One of the frustrating things about the internet is the clickbait. Those headlines that begin, 'Here's why...', 'This is how...', '12 thi...

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Why blue keeps you awake

Mobile phone and app designers have noticed something that you probably spotted before you started school. In the day, the sky is blue. I...

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Miserable people understand people better

People are surprising. It’s a good job: if we and others always behaved in the way we’d expect, there wouldn’t be any psychologists. Stud...

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