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Category: Psychology

The sea was never blue

The sea was never blue

Maria Michela Sassi writes: Homer used two adjectives to describe aspects of the colour blue: kuaneos, to denote a dark shade of blue merging into black; and glaukos, to describe a sort of ‘blue-grey’, notably used in Athena’s epithet glaukopis, her ‘grey-gleaming eyes’. He describes the sky as big, starry, or of iron or bronze (because of its solid fixity). The tints of a rough sea range from ‘whitish’ (polios) and ‘blue-grey’ (glaukos) to deep blue and almost black (kuaneos, melas). The sea in its calm…

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How crises so often bring out the best in us

How crises so often bring out the best in us

Zeynep Tufekci writes: The news that thousands of Burning Man festivalgoers were told to conserve food and water after torrential rains left them trapped by impassable mud in the Nevada desert led some to chortle about a “Lord of the Flies” scenario for the annual gathering popular with tech lords and moguls. Alas, I have to spoil the hate-the-tech-rich revelries. No matter how this mess is resolved — and many there seem to be coping — the common belief that…

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Why do we dream?

Why do we dream?

Amanda Gefter writes: In the late nineteen-nineties, a neuroscientist named Mark Blumberg stood in a lab at the University of Iowa watching a litter of sleeping rats. Blumberg was then on the cusp of forty; the rats were newborns, and jerked and spasmed as they slept. Blumberg knew that the animals were fine. He had often seen his dogs twitch their paws while asleep. People, he knew, also twitch during sleep: our muscles contract to make small, sharp movements, and…

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Do spiders dream?

Do spiders dream?

Carolyn Wilke writes: Young jumping spiders dangle by a thread through the night, in a box, in a lab. Every so often, their legs curl and their spinnerets twitch — and the retinas of their eyes, visible through their translucent exoskeletons, shift back and forth. “What these spiders are doing seems to be resembling — very closely — REM sleep,” says Daniela Rößler, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. During REM (which stands for rapid eye…

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The cult of MAGA will eventually end

The cult of MAGA will eventually end

Peter Sagal writes: [Cult expert, Daniella Mestyanek] Young doesn’t believe that anybody can be argued out of Trumpism (or any other firmly held belief). People can save only themselves, as she did [when she escaped from the Children of God]. But she argues that such self-rescues are happening all around us. “Twenty years ago,” she told me, “when I walked away from a cult, it was much rarer to meet Americans like me, who are completely estranged from their families…

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A basic form of numeracy is shared by countless creatures

A basic form of numeracy is shared by countless creatures

Brian Butterworth writes: You might think of counting as something that people do involving the words one, two, three and so on. But we don’t require the use of these words to enumerate a collection of objects. Indeed, some languages do not have long lists of counting words. In studies of children who speak languages with a smaller set of such words (eg, words for one, two, few and many), such as the Indigenous Australian language Warlpiri, my colleagues and I found that they were at least as accurate…

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Shame makes people living in poverty more supportive of authoritarianism, study finds

Shame makes people living in poverty more supportive of authoritarianism, study finds

PsyPost reports: A series of three studies in Germany found that people living in poverty frequently experience exclusion from different aspects of society and devaluation leading to the feeling of shame. Such shame, in turn, increases their support for authoritarianism due to the promise that that they will be included in the society again authoritarian leaders typically make. The study was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Poverty is defined as a lack of the capability to live…

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Augustine of Hippo and the virtue of hope

Augustine of Hippo and the virtue of hope

Michael Lamb writes: The binary between optimism and pessimism does not capture the complexity of Augustine’s thought. As concepts, ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’ came to be employed only in the 18th century. Moreover, the binary overlooks Augustine’s more nuanced account of hope as a virtue that finds a middle way between the vices of presumption and despair. The difference that it makes when we understand hope as a virtue is often missed in contemporary discourse, which tends to characterise hope as an attitude or emotion and to…

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You might not be as good at spotting bullshit as you think you are

You might not be as good at spotting bullshit as you think you are

PsyPost reports: Is there a bullshit blind spot? A series of two studies recently found that people who were the worst at detecting bullshit not only grossly overestimated their detection ability, but also overestimated their ability compared to other people. In other words, they not only believe that they are better at detecting BS than they actually are, they also believe that they are better at it than the average person. At the same time, those who were best at…

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Deliberate ignorance is useful in certain circumstances, researchers say

Deliberate ignorance is useful in certain circumstances, researchers say

Sujata Gupta writes: In 1961, renowned German novelist Günter Grass openly criticized communist East Germany for building the Berlin Wall ostensibly to prevent West Germans from infiltrating the country. In reality, the wall was more effective at preventing East Germans from defecting. From that point on, East German secret police known as the Stasi shadowed Grass, a West German who frequently visited his neighbors to the East. In their notes, the Stasi refer to Grass with the code name “Bolzen,”…

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The lies mothers tell themselves and their children

The lies mothers tell themselves and their children

Elise Loehnen writes: As Carl Jung famously said, nothing is more influential in a child’s life than the unlived life of the parent. My mother’s unlived life ricochets inside my life. My mom is an ardent reader — it’s probably no coincidence that my brother is a book editor and I make my living with words. And like her, I have children — but I wanted mine. In this anxious inheritance from my mother and my grandmother, I’ve both under-…

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What the ‘fundamental attribution error’ misses about blame

What the ‘fundamental attribution error’ misses about blame

Laura Niemi, Jesse Graham, and John M Doris write: Classic research says we overlook situational factors in explaining people’s misdeeds. But the reality is more complex. The new principal of a school on the verge of closure has vowed to turn things around. Half a year in, however, the outlook is bleak. If students do not meet national performance baselines on their upcoming standardised tests, it will be the last straw for the struggling school. The principal knows that his teachers…

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Are world happiness rankings culturally biased?

Are world happiness rankings culturally biased?

Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas writes: Every year, the World Happiness Report ranks 146 countries around the globe by their average level of happiness. Scandinavian countries usually top the list, the U.S. falls someplace in the mid-teens, and war-torn and deeply impoverished countries are at the bottom. The happiness scores come from a survey of life satisfaction, which goes something like this: Considering your life as a whole and using the mental image of a ladder, with the best possible life as…

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Why cursing is a healthy feature of human behavior

Why cursing is a healthy feature of human behavior

Alex Orlando writes: Well, damn. Maybe you stubbed your toe first thing in the morning. Or some thoughtless commuter forced you to slam the brakes on the drive to work. Perhaps you’re just fed up with it all and feel like sinking to your knees and cursing the heavens. If you’ve ever suppressed the urge to unleash a string of obscenities, maybe think again. Some research suggests that it might be a better idea to simply let the filth fly….

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Feminism taught me all I need to know about men like Trump and Putin

Feminism taught me all I need to know about men like Trump and Putin

Rebecca Solnit writes: As the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolded, I was reminded over and over again of the behaviour of abusive ex-husbands and boyfriends. At first he thinks that he can simply bully her into returning. When it turns out she has no desire to return, he shifts to vengeance. Putin insisted that Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia and didn’t have a separate existence. He expected his army to grab and subjugate with ease, even be welcomed. Now…

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Cockatoos know how to pick the right tools for the job

Cockatoos know how to pick the right tools for the job

The New York Times reports: Cockatoos contain contradictions. “They behave like gremlins,” said Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, a biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. His colleague Alice Auersperg agreed. “Imagine a toddler with pliers in their head,” she said, that is also able to fly. But just like toddlers, cockatoos can be sweet and curious, always exploring the world around them. Dr. Auersperg and other researchers showed the innateness of this curiosity in 2021, when they reported that wild Goffin’s…

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