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Psychology

A collection of 46 issues

From Living Instinctively to Living With History

Listening to my maternal grandparents narrate their experience of living with Muslims was confusing. According to them, Hindus and Muslims lived harmoniously. They also liked each other. Hindus and Muslims wouldn’t eat at each other’s houses or may use separate utensils but that had less to do with

Noise: A Flaw in Book Writing

This is a review of Noise, A Flaw in Human Judgment by Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein. The phrase “noise in decision making” brings to mind “random” error. Scientists, however, shy away from random error. Science is mostly about systematic error, except, perhaps, quantum physics. So Kahneman et al. conceive of

Routine Maintenance: How to Build Habits

With Mark Paluta Building a habit means trying to maximize the probability of doing something at some regular cadence. max [P(do the thing)] This is difficult because we have time-inconsistent preferences. When asked if we would prefer to run or watch TV next Wednesday afternoon, we are more likely

Unsighted: Why Some Important Findings Remain Uncited

Poring over the first 500 citations of the over 900 citations for Fear and Loathing across Party Lines on Google Scholar (7/31/2020), I could not find a single study citing the paper for racial discrimination. You may think the reason is obvious—the paper is about partisan prejudice,

Gaming Measurement: Using Economic Games to Measure Discrimination

Prejudice is the bane of humanity. Measurement of prejudice, in turn, is a bane of social scientists. Self-reports are unsatisfactory. Like talk, they are cheap and thus biased and noisy. Implicit measures don’t even pass the basic hurdle of measurement—reliability. Against this grim background, economic games as measures

The Declining Value of Personal Advice

There used to be a time when before buying something, you asked your friends and peers about advice, and it was the optimal thing to do. These days, it is often not a great use of time. It is generally better to go online. Today, the Internet abounds with comprehensive,

Why do We Fail? And What to do About It?

I recently read Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. (You can read my review of the book here and my notes on the book here.) The book made me think harder about failure and how to prevent it. Here’s a result of that thinking. We fail because we don’t

Wanted: Effects That Support My Hypothesis

Do survey respondents account for the hypothesis that they think people fielding the survey have when they respond? The answer, according to Mummolo and Peterson, is not much. Their paper also very likely provides the reason why—people don’t pay much attention. Figure 3 provides data on manipulation checks—

Advice that works

Writing habits of some writers: “Early in the morning. A good writing day starts at 4 AM. By 11 AM the rest of the world is fully awake and so the day goes downhill from there.” Daniel Gilbert “Usually, by the time my kids get off to school and I

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 front on assault on the misunderstanding of risk. His