Stone Age minds in internet time
The journalist Kenneth Miller has an article in the current Discover magazine on “How Our Ancient Brains Are Coping in the Age of Digital Distraction”. I mak...
All posts tagged with psychology
Legacy of a candidate gene and replication in genomics
During the 1990s and early 2000s, many human geneticists and other scientists (especially psychologists) tried to study the genetics of human traits by follo...
Why won’t Science publish replication studies?
An article in Slate by Kevin Arceneaux and coworkers recounts their experiences trying to publish a replication of a high-profile psychology study in Science...
Is it meaningful if geneticists find that marriage can be influenced by genes?
The power of gene-trait association studies has increased markedly over the last few years. Samples of hundreds of thousands of individuals with genotype and...
Should people lay off social psychologists with unreplicable ideas?
Pardis Sabeti has written an op/ed for the Boston Globe addressing the scientific casualties of the “replication crisis” in social psychology: “For better sc...
Linking out to a book review on sociogenomics
The journal Nature has a review of the new book, Social by Nature: The Promise and Peril of Sociogenomics, by Catherine Bliss. The review is written by Natha...
Bonobo preferences: dominance over cooperation
An article in Current Biology by Christopher Krupenye and Brian Hare suggests that bonobos may have a social preference for individuals who wear their domina...
Link: Language development in the Tsimané
A nice article in Scientific American by Dana Smith looks at a new study of language development in the Tsimané people of Bolivia: “Parents in a Remote Amazo...
Fuentes on creativity and human collaboration
Agustín Fuentes has a short essay in New York magazine’s “Science of Us”: “Creative Collaboration Is What Humans Do Best.”
Link: A comment on replicability by a psychologist
Joe Simmons on psychology: “What I Want Our Field To Prioritize”.
Link: Replication crisis and status competition in psychology
The ongoing “replication crisis” in psychology has become an interesting study in the sociology of science. I don’t have anything especially deep to say abou...
An interview on gorilla emotions
The Pacific Standard is running a nice interview with anthropologist Barbara King, by Francie Diep: “How Do Gorillas Grieve?”. It touches on the recent killi...
An oxytocin lab opens its drawers to let out the unpublished null results
This came to me via Razib Khan, and the signal deserves amplification: “Is there a publication bias in behavioral intranasal oxytocin research on humans? Ope...
Link: Ghostly face emerges from averaging photos of inanimate objects
From Ethan Siegel: I’m weirdly fascinated by the ghostly image of a human face that emerges after averaging dozens of inanimate objects: “Averaging Inanimate...
Link: Carl Safina on animal grief
An evocative excerpt from the new book by Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel:
Variation in cognitive traits and genetics
A new study of more than 50,000 people has identified some of the genetic variations that underlie cognitive variation among middle-aged and older adults (Da...
Music and monkeys
BBC Earth is running a story by Colin Barras looking at the origins of music in ancient humans and possible perceptual preadaptation to music in other primat...
Link: Diversity and productivity in programming teams
Interesting outcome of a study of GitHub open source projects: Teams are more productive when they have greater diversity in the length of time on project (t...
Michael Tomasello on the importance of cooperation
From Nautilus this month, a long profile article by Kat McGowan describing the work of Michael Tomasello: “Cooperation is what makes us human”. The focus of ...
Death in deep history
I’ve kept a post by Kristina Killgrove sitting on my desktop for a long time. Although the post is specifically about a particular highly-reported study on a...
The value of the pretest
Every semester for the past three years, I have begun my Anthropology 105 course with a “concept inventory” quiz, otherwise known as a pretest. My students a...
Lifetime interactions of male hunter-gatherers
Human hunter-gatherers, despite living in small groups of 20-50 individuals, make social contacts with up to a thousand other individuals in across their lif...
Evolutionary psychology and the hipster beard
Today this story in ScienceNOW tumbled across my feed:
"Cavemom parenting"
Heather Turgeon, in Babble, writes a note of skepticism about the “natural” mode of parenting: “The Science of Cavemom Parenting and Whether You Should Try ...
Mathematical thinking
The Kavli Foundation sponsored an interesting conversation among four scientists about whether mathematical concepts are natural or inventions of humans: “Wh...
Brain plasticity in adults and cognition
I ran across a study from a couple of years ago by Rachel Brans and colleagues, which has an interesting result showing a genetic correlation between plastic...
Thinking simply
Vaughan Bell has a nice piece in the Guardian on folk psychology – how ordinary people tend to think about their own thinking: “Our brains, and how they’re n...
Neandertal anti-defamation files, 18
I recently ran across a book of relationship advice by John V. Farrar, titled Dump the Neanderthal; Choose Your Prime Mate.
Chomping Chomsky
I ran into Deevy Bishop’s review of a recent book by Noam Chomsky and James McGilvray, titled The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray.
"Rewriting history in a way that flatters our volition"
Alex Stone, author of Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, gives a short account of the psychological insig...
Non-consensual replication
Yes, it is a star!
Telling stories
Are narrative stories the glue that holds society together? That’s the thesis of literature professor Jonathan Gottschall, who has written for the Boston Glo...
Spielke profile
The New York Times has a long profile of developmental psychologist Elizabeth Spielke, whose work with babies has opened a window on early cognition (“Insigh...
Zeigarnik, bane of bloggers
Maria Konnikova takes a psychological experiment on memory into an excursion on literature: “On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take ...
Quote: Edward Sapir on language and social reality
Edward Sapir, from “The Status of Linguistics as a Science”:
"False-positive psychology"
Razib Khan conveys a list of suggestions from a recent paper by Joseph Simmons and colleagues Simmons:false:2011, concerned with reducing reporting biases in...
Magical psychology
I enjoyed this article by Mo Costandi: “Sleights of hand, sleights of mind”.
No echoing the echo chamber here
Seems to be a theme going in the press today: The Internet is making us stupid by connecting us with the things we like.
Monkey numerical distractions
This study has been out for a few weeks, and I’ve been meaning to put up a short comment about it: “Representational format determines numerical competence i...
The eyes have it
Mark Brown in Wired describes some psychology research showing that people change their behavior in response to posters that bear images of staring eyes:
Nowhere the rational man
David Sloan Wilson has been posting a series on behavioral economics (“Economics and evolution as different paradigms”). This, broadly speaking, is based on ...
Hauser update
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on an “internal document” from the Marc Hauser investigation: “Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard”. T...
Clearing the stack
Here are some links that have been piling up in my browser tabs this week:
"Accept failure": A New Year's resolution?
Jonah Lehrer reports on what happens when scientists see the unexpected:
Anonymous research subjects
New frontiers in human research subjects: PARC researcher Markus Jacobsson describes how to find anonymous research subjects via Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” s...
Whorfed
I found an interesting essay by Lera Boroditsky on Edge, titled, “How does our language shape the way we think?” She describes cross-cultural psychology expe...
Seventy years of studying happiness
The Atlantic has a feature story, “What makes us happy?”, about the Harvard Study of Adult Development – a 72-year-old study of originally-normal Harvard und...
Archaeology informing the modern
The Economist runs a little article about Sir Arthur Evans and Knossos:
Pleasurable homology
A long time ago, I got into a very heated argument with somebody about whether animals feel pleasure. I don’t think we disagreed really in the particulars – ...
Robert Lowie on anthropology and psychology
It is hard to find a better discussion of how anthropology relates to culture than the first chapter of Robert Lowie’s 1917 book, Culture and Ethnology. For ...