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Psychology

A collection of 24 issues

The Risk of Misunderstanding Risk

Women who participate in breast cancer screening from 50 to 69 live on average 12 more days. This is the best case scenario. Gerd has more such compelling numbers in his book, Calculated Risks. Gerd shares such numbers to launch a frontal assault on the misunderstanding of risk. His key

Disgusting

Vegetarians turn at the thought of eating the meat of a cow that has died from a heart attack. The disgust that vegetarians experience is not principled. Nor is the greater opposition to homosexuality that people espouse when they are exposed to a foul smell. Haidt uses similar such provocative

Ruined by Google

Information on tap is a boon. But if it means that the only thing we will end up knowing—have in our heads—is where to go to find the information, it may also be a bane. Accessible stored cognitions are vital. They allow us to verify and contextualize new

Loss of Confidence

We all overestimate how much we know. If the aphorism, “the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know” is true, then how else could it be? But knowing more is not the only path to learning about our ignorance. Mistakes are another. When we make

Pride and Prejudice

It is ‘so obvious’ that policy A >> policy B that only those who don’t want to know or who want inferior things would support policy B. Does this conversation remind you of any that you have had? We don’t just have such conversations about policies. We

Estimating Bias and Error in Perceptions of Group Composition

People’s reports of perceptions of the share of various groups in the population are typically biased. The bias is generally greater for smaller groups. The bias also appears to vary by how people feel about the group—they are likelier to think that the groups they don’t like

Stereotypical Understanding

The paucity of women in Computer Science, Math, and Engineering in the US is justly widely lamented. Sometimes, the imbalance is attributed to gender stereotypes. But only a small fraction of men study these fields. And in absolute terms, the proportion of women in these fields is not a great

Capuchin Monkeys and Fairness: I Want At Least As Much As The Other

In a much heralded experiment, we see that a Capuchin monkey rejects a reward (food) for doing a task after seeing another monkey being rewarded with something more appetizing for doing the same task. It has been interpreted as evidence for our ‘instinct for fairness’. But there is more to