"I really don't see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to unpronounceable corners of the world in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs, when in fact the weirdest and most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep. I am of course talking about my own native culture - the british." / "[...] when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol."

"people are playing farmville because people are playing farmville."

"[...] remez and colleagues demonstrated a dramatic change in the way in which sine-wave speech sentences are perceived, depending on listener's specific prior knowledge."

"[...] people [who already] had a tendency to have hallucinations in everyday life had a much greater level of perceptual distortion after leaving the chamber than the others."

"the speaker mentions that more choice is worse unless you know what you want, then it's better."

"I'm not that surprised that these ideas aren't that popular, they are difficult and potentially subversive. not subversive in the cool way, but subversive of the enormous efforts that individuals and society put in to the effort to construct the appearance of coherent and unified selves."

"ostensible food additives were rated as more harmful when their names were difficult to pronounce than when their names were easy to pronounce, and amusement-park rides were rated as more likely to make one sick (an undesirable risk) and also as more exciting and adventurous (a desirable risk) when their names were difficult to pronounce than when their names were easy to pronounce."

fooled by discontinuities.

"work done against the background color red is relatively more accurate, while with blue it is more creative."

"[...] given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap." / "the burn of embarrassment is, in some sense, the pilot light of motivation."

"think of any smart person you know well, and I bet there is some circumstance, some confluence of emotion and social pressure, where they dropped their reasoning and made a stupid, but easily aviodable, choice." -- you could start by just thinking of yourself ...

requoted: "[...] generosity and solidarity towards one's own may have emerged only in combination with hostility towards outsiders."

"[...] in patients with chronic hand pain, magnifying their view of their own limb during movement significantly increases the pain and swelling evoked by movement. by contrast, minifying their view [...] significantly decreases the pain and swelling [...]. these results show a top-down effect of body image on body tissues, thus demonstrating that the link between body image and the tissues is bi-directional."

requoted: "metaphors such as icy stare depict social exclusion using cold-related concepts; they are not to be taken literally and certainly do not imply reduced temperature. two experiments, however, revealed that social exclusion literally feels cold."

"you give people a pencil, and have them watch cartoons. first, they watch with a pencil in their mouths horizontally, and then with a pencil in their mouths sticking straight out. and they are rating how funny the cartoons are. cartoons are a lot funnier if you have a pencil in your mouth horizontally, than if you have the pencil sticking straight out."

requoted: "it occurred to me, as I sat there watching [my hotel room porn], that jacking off in a hotel room was not unlike the larger experience of campaign reporting. you watch two performers. you kind of like it when one of them gets humiliated. you know they’re professionals, so you don’t feel much sympathy for them. you wish you could participate, but instead you watch with a hidden envy and feel vaguely ashamed for watching."

requoted: "participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive [...] images in noise, [...] illusory correlations in stock market information, [...] conspiracies, and developing superstitions."

"and so you get what I call the natural progression, the three i's: the innovators, the imitators, and the idiots. and that's what happens. everybody just kind of goes along. and you look kind of silly if you disagree. [...] and all I can say is beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas."

requoted: "rather than uphold abstract principles of justice, moral judgment may sometimes just help people feel a little less foolish."

woah. -- requoted: "we falsely suggested to 180 subjects that, as children, they had gotten ill after eating egg salad. results showed that, after this manipulation, a significant minority of subjects came to believe they had experienced this childhood event even though they had initially denied having experienced it."

mental processes inextricably tied to the environment they are operating in? bad news for a lot of lab-based psychological research.

I blame the lisp. actually, one heck of a great demonstration of the forer effect.

the colour and shape of emotion.

"the findings suggest that face evaluation involves an overgeneralization of adaptive mechanisms for inferring harmful intentions and the ability to cause harm and can account for rapid, yet not necessarily accurate, judgments from faces."

placebo: "[...] the most effective evidence-based treatment known to science."

requoted: "holmes’s [...] “grooving on” puzzles and cryptograms and his penchant for magnificent synthesis of details to solve a given case are quite analogous to the amphetamine addict’s intense curiosity and preoccupation with minutiae. even at a low point in the drug-use cycle, these persons will seek out stimulating mechanical or intellectual puzzles."

"indeed, the more democratic a society, the more susceptible to terror."

how nice that this comes along just when I'm reading jaynes.

"personality ratings of 196 cats were made [...]"

crazy, controversial, strangely compelling.

milgram 2008.