Human Psychology
Learned Helplessness: When Experience Teaches You to Stop Trying
In the 1960s, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier were conducting experiments with dogs, running standard classical conditioning procedures involving mild ele…
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Results for "psychology"
30 articles found
Human Psychology
Technology
The Psychology of Social Media: How Algorithms Shape Our Behavior
Social media platforms are meticulously designed to capture and hold our attention, but the psychological impact of these algorithms is profound. These sys…
Psychology
The Psychology of AI: Why We Trust (or Fear) Intelligent Machines
Our relationship with AI is complex and often emotional. We can be awed by its capabilities, frustrated by its limitations, and sometimes, deeply uneasy ab…
Human Psychology
The Psychology of Procrastination: It Is Not About Laziness
Almost everyone who procrastinates believes, on some level, that the problem is laziness. That belief is wrong, and it makes procrastination worse. When yo…
Human Stupidity
Why We Justify Everything We Do: The Psychology of Self-Deception
There is a version of yourself you carry around in your head that is more consistent, more principled, and more logical than the version that actually move…
Human Psychology
The Halo Effect: How One Trait Colours Everything Else We See
Edward Thorndike named the halo effect in 1920 based on his research with military officers. He noticed that officers' ratings of their soldiers were highl…
Human Behaviour
Tribalism: The Feature That Became a Bug
For most of human evolutionary history, belonging to a group was not optional. It was survival. Being cast out of the tribe meant facing predators, starvat…
Human Psychology
The Hedonic Treadmill: Why Getting What You Want Does Not Make You Happy
In 1978, Philip Brickman and colleagues published a study that should have been more famous than it became. They compared the happiness levels of lottery w…
Human Psychology
Cognitive Dissonance: The Engine Behind Human Change and Human Stubbornness
Cognitive dissonance is among the most important ideas in twentieth-century psychology, and it is widely misunderstood. Most people think it just means hol…
Human Psychology
The Fundamental Attribution Error: We Judge Others Harshly and Ourselves Gently
Someone cuts you off in traffic and you immediately form a judgment about what kind of person they are. Then, a few minutes later, you cut someone else off…
Human Psychology
The Anchoring Effect: How the First Number You Hear Controls Your Thinking
Before you answer the next question, spin an imaginary wheel of fortune. It stops on 65. Now: what percentage of African countries are members of the Unite…
Human Behaviour
The Psychology of Lying: Why Everyone Lies and Nobody Admits It
Bella DePaulo and her colleagues asked college students and community members to keep a diary of all their social interactions and to record any lies they…
Human Stupidity
Sunk Cost Fallacy: Why We Throw Good Money After Bad
You have been watching a film for forty-five minutes and you are not enjoying it. You paid for the ticket. Do you leave, or do you sit through the remainin…
Human Behaviour
Moral Licensing: Doing Good Makes Us Feel Free to Do Bad
Suppose you donate to a charity in the morning. In the afternoon, you face a decision that involves some ethical dimension — helping a colleague, being h…
Human Psychology
The Spotlight Effect: Nobody Is Watching You As Much As You Think
You show up to a meeting with a stain on your shirt and spend the next hour acutely aware of it, certain that everyone in the room has noticed and is priva…
Human Psychology
Ego Depletion and Willpower: The Glucose Theory of Self-Control
Roy Baumeister introduced the idea of ego depletion in the late 1990s. The hypothesis was simple and compelling: self-control draws on a limited resource…
Human Behaviour
The Milgram Experiment: How Ordinary People Do Terrible Things
In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram ran a series of experiments that changed how we understand human nature. His question was simple and urgent: how…
Philosophy
Nietzsche and the Death of God: Finding Your Own Values
When Nietzsche proclaimed "God is dead," he wasn’t celebrating. He was issuing a stark warning about the modern condition. For centuries, Western moralit…
Human Behaviour
Status Anxiety: The Hidden Driver of Most Human Behaviour
You probably do not think of yourself as particularly preoccupied with status. Most people do not, which is part of how status anxiety does its work so eff…
Human Behaviour
The Bystander Effect: Why We Watch and Do Nothing
In 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was attacked outside her apartment in New York City. Newspaper reports at the time claimed that 38 witnesses watched…
Human Psychology
Why Humans Are Addicted to Stories Over Facts
Here is a statistic: global child mortality has fallen by more than half since 1990, representing tens of millions of lives saved. Most people have no accu…
Human Psychology
Dark Triad: The Personality Traits That Make Someone Genuinely Dangerous
Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams coined the term dark triad in 2002 to describe three personality traits that share a core of callousness, manipulation, a…
Human Psychology
How Your Brain Creates Memories That Never Happened
There is a memory you have that is almost certainly wrong in at least one significant detail. You might remember a childhood event and have the location wr…
Marketing
Marketing and Brand Strategy: Telling Stories That Matter
I’ve always loved the psychology behind why people buy things. Marketing is that in practice. I started in social media management, which was fun, but I…
Human Stupidity
Dunning-Kruger Is Not What You Think It Is
If you spend any time in online debates, you have probably seen the Dunning-Kruger effect invoked. Someone says something confidently wrong, and someone el…
Human Stupidity
The Availability Heuristic: Why Rare Events Feel Common
After a plane crash receives weeks of saturation news coverage, airline ticket sales drop significantly. After a shark attack makes the front page, beach a…
Human Psychology
Why Smart People Make Dumb Decisions Every Single Day
You probably know someone who aced every exam, got into a top university, and still manages to make baffling choices in their personal life. Maybe that per…
Human Stupidity
Illusory Superiority: Why Everyone Thinks They Are Above Average
Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon is a place where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average…
Rise of America
The Roaring Twenties: American Consumer Culture Is Born
The nineteen twenties in America were years of dizzying transformation in the texture of everyday life. The automobile went from novelty to necessity. Radi…
Social Media
Meta's Algorithm Wants You Angry and That Is by Design
Facebook's algorithm learned something years ago. Anger keeps people scrolling longer than joy. An outrageous post gets comments. Shares. Arguments. The al…