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...
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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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....
Remembering something doesn’t mean it happened
We come to the truth in many ways. We read books, think, listen to other people and experience things directly. Other people lie...