Research suggests when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.
Rosenthal went on to study precisely that – what expectation mean for our children. In one line of research he showed that teachers´ expectations greatly affect their students´ academic performance, e...
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...
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...
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
Dershowitz may have felt justified in misleading the jury because, in his words, the courtroom oath—‘to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’—is applicable only to witnesses. Defe...
Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triump...
In Leipzig [in the 14th century], the university found it necessary to promulgate a rule against throwing stones at the professors. As late as 1495, a German statute explicitly forbade anyone associat...
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...
Meanwhile, a serving of broccoli may contain sixty aphids and/or mites,
Not too long ago, the man who was then the president of Iran was quoted as saying that Jews descended from monkeys and pigs.
On June 18, 1964, about 11:30 a.m. Mrs. Juanita Brooks, who had been shopping, was walking home along an alley in the San Pedro area of the city of Los Angeles. She was pulling behind her a wicker bas...
One end of the spectrum of fantastical thinking is labeled crackpot, and the other visionary.
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
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...
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...
The Nazis confiscated his personal property, burned his works on relativity, and put a five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.
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...
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...
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...
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