As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories...
After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling…. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings.6
A vivid example of such a change in social equilibrium occurred in the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when travelers, afraid to take airplanes, suddenly switched to cars. Their fear t...
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
A FEW YEARS AGO a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his accomplishment, he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. I dreamed of the numb...
Few people would engage in extended activity if they believed that there were a random connection between what they did and the rewards they received,15 Lerner concluded that for the sake of their own...
The difficulty in making sense of even simple speech is well appreciated by computer scientists who struggle to create machines that can respond to natural language. Their frustration is illustrated b...
Says Bargh: „We all hold dear idea that we´re the captain of our own sould, and we´re in charge, and it´s a very scary feeling when we are not. In fact, that´s what psychosis is – the feeling of detac...
Say your boss has been taking longer than usual to respond to your e-mails. Many people would take that as a sign that their star is falling because if your star is falling, the chances are high that...
Research suggests when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.
Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data. A
Meanwhile, a serving of broccoli may contain sixty aphids and/or mites,
In particular, what seems special about humans is our desire and ability to understand what other people think and feel. Called theory of mind, or ToM, this ability gives humans a remarkable power to...
Historians, whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted.
Deep concentration causes the energy consumption in your brain to go up by only about 1 percent. No matter what you are doing with your conscious mind, it is your unconscious that dominates your menta...
The destination was the local cemetery, where everyone was ordered to dig a mass grave and then was shot dead and buried in it.
Well, I have been working on my own theory for twelve years, and then he proceeded to describe it in excruciating detail. When he was finished, Feynman turned to me and said, in front of the man who h...
We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feeli...
Twenty-four centuries ago, a Greek man stood at the sea’s edge watching ships disappear in the distance. Aristotle must have passed much time there, quietly observing many vessels, for eventually he w...
To understand my doctor’s error, let’s employ Bayes’s method. The first step is to define the sample space. We could include everyone who has ever taken an HIV test, but we’ll get a more accurate resu...