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Why do we remember politicians as being against things they were for, and vice versa?
Archive for the ‘Social Sciences’ Category
May 5th, 2013
Category: Psychology
Kahneman FTW: “When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, often without noticing the substitution.”
January 22nd, 2013
Category: Health and Medicine, Psychology
American couples often don’t recognize how social class differences produce marital conflict
December 9th, 2012
Category: Personal moment, Psychology
At an annual conference, I have lunch with a colleague whom I don’t know very well. When the bill comes he says that he paid when we had lunch once before a few years back, and he even remembers the approximate amount. I pay the bill, tip generously to make it equal to his prior [...]
November 27th, 2012
Category: Crime Control, Psychology
False confessions in criminal cases are very hard to reverse in the minds of police, jurors and judges, even when substantial evidence is available to show that the confession is false. Saul Kassin of the John Jay College of Justice has a fascinating paper in American Psychologist [abstract free, $ for full article] on false [...]
November 19th, 2012
Category: Political Science, Psychology
Long-time reader Ed Whitney wrote me an email that was too intriguing to keep as a private communication. Ed graciously agreed to turn his thoughts into a guest blog post. What follows was written by him: Nate Silver’s new book, The Signal and the Noise, begins with a sobering parallel between the age of the [...]