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Kahneman FTW: “When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, often without noticing the substitution.”
Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category
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 [...]
October 20th, 2012
Category: Health and Medicine, Psychology
Former State Legislator Paul Gionfriddo’s anguished account of his son’s schizophenia is a must read: In 2008, at age 23, Tim moved to San Francisco and has lived mostly on the streets there ever since. The last time I visited him, he was holed up for a while in a small room a caseworker had [...]
August 18th, 2012
Category: Psychology
This is a mea culpa post. I was a bit dismissive of State Senator Troy Balderson’s efforts to create a policy to prevent a recurrence of the exotic animal zoo disaster in Ohio this spring. Lowry Heussler was correct at the time to note that this is a serious issue. I had wrongly assumed that [...]
June 4th, 2012
Category: Psychology
I once spent a weekend in another city with a couple who had been married for about 5 years. On my last night in town, I proposed taking them out to a posh restaurant to thank them for their hospitality. As we prepared to leave the house, Lila looked over at her husband across the [...]