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Topic

Psychology

A collection of 44 issues

Motivated Citations

The best kind of insight is the ‘duh’ insight—catching something that is exceedingly common, almost routine, but something that no one talks about. I believe this is one such insight. The standards for citing congenial research (that supports the hypothesis of choice) are considerably lower than the standards for

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

Raising Money for Causes

Four teenagers, on the cusp of adulthood, and eminently well to do, were out on the pavement raising money for children struck with cancer. They had been out raising money for a couple of hours, and from a glance at their tin pot, I estimated that they had raised about

Representativeness Heuristic, Base Rates, and Bayes

From the Introduction of their edited volume: Tversky and Kahneman used the following experiment for testing ‘representativeness heuristic’ – Subjects are shown a brief personality description of several individuals, sampled at random from 100 professionals – engineers and lawyers. Subjects are asked to assess whether the description is of an engineer or

Nudging

Nudging the mood? Important consequential decisions in life are hostage to our mood. What we intend to do (and actually do) often varies by mood. Mood, in turn, can vary due to a variety of exogenous reasons â€“ negative swings can be caused by ill-health (a headache, or allergies) and