He has the right air about him, and the same freedom from anxiety and free-flowing creative energy of a college student because, for him, college (i.e. the time of life in which most middle-class peoples’ lives peak) never ended.

The funnel graph visually captures the distortions of selective reporting. For instance, after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn’t random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed,” Palmer told me. “As a researcher, you’re always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is.” In a recent review article, Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: “We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated.”

I think it would be too easy to say that a skeptical person would and should have avoided investing in a Madoff fund. The big mistake here was in throwing all caution to the wind, as in the stories of many people (some quite elderly) who invested every last dollar with Madoff or one of his feeder funds. Such blind faith in one person, or investment scheme, has something of a religious quality to it, not unlike the continued faith that many of the “Drakers” continued to have in Oscar Hartzell even after the fraudulent nature of his scheme began to become very evident. So the skeptical course of action would have been not to avoid a Madoff investment entirely but to ensure that one maintained a sufficient safety net in the event (however low a probability it might have seemed) that Madoff turned out to be not the Messiah but Satan. As I avoided drinking a full glass of Madoff Kool-aid, maybe I’m not as lacking in wisdom as I thought.

cognitive psychology readings group

The brain is a fearsomely complex information-processing environment--one that often eludes our ability to understand it. At any given time, the brain is collecting, filtering, and analyzing information and, in response, performing countless intricate processes, some of which are automatic, some voluntary, some conscious, and some unconscious. Cognitive neuroscience is one of the ways we have to understand the workings of our minds. It's the study of the brain biology behind our mental functions: a collection of methods--like brain scanning and computational modeling--combined with a way of looking at psychological phenomena and discovering where, why, and how the brain makes them happen. Want to know more? Mind Hacks is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment works of the brain. Using cognitive neuroscience, these experiments, tricks, and tips related to vision, motor skills, attention, cognition, subliminal perception, and more throw light on how the human brain works.

In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers in economic psychology such as Herbert Simon challenged the strong assumption made by economic theorists that individual decision-making is purely rational. Economists responded with vigorous new lines of work that addressed many of these concerns. Since then, experimental and behavioral economics have flourished and have been honored with the Nobel Prizes awarded to Vernon Smith and Daniel Kahneman. Recent advances in psychology are raising new challenges to economic assumptions. On page 1111 of this issue, Marchiori and Warglien (1) open a fresh avenue by which we can use models of neural networks to understand how humans learn as they make economic decisions.

In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and potential abuse. Still, cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society, and a proper societal response will involve making enhancements available while managing their risks.

i.e. if the bus stop sign is hard to read, less people will ride the bus. / So, no wonder it is difficult for us to figure out what is driving our behavior. Very simple aspects of our environment that make information easy or hard to process can influence the likelihood that we will engage in different behaviors.

We are all part of social networks that are communicating, interacting. And this allows us to start applying cybernetic principles to psychological and social issues. Memes are not about “communication” or transfer of data. Memes are programming instructions. They are tied to actions. Memes are just the packet on this network. And the packets are usually programs which get installed on the system that accepts them. That system is you and I. Because we are components in a very large system and made up of smaller systems and components the percentage of control we are generally capable of at least at first is really small because we are constrained both by our constituting components and the system of interactions within which we are embedded.

The colors themselves are also a problem. As I'm sure you all remember keenly from this post I wrote in 2006, perceptual image codecs spend more bits on brightness than on color because the color-sensing cones in your eyes have a much lousier dynamic range than the light-sensing rods. We're worse at distinguishing between levels of color than between levels of brightness. And since the percentage of the vote in any given spot on the map should always sum to 100, with negligible green (third party) contributions, the brightness will be relatively uniform (although admittedly not quite due to the perceptual differences between colors — monitor calibration and colorspace begins to enter the picture here, and is just as hideously complex as you might imagine).

Just 19 more days like this one and the Dow Jones industrial average will be at zero. And we can all start over from scratch.

Dr Tom Stafford, a lecturer at the University of Sheffield and co-author of the book Mind Hacks, believes that the same fundamental learning mechanisms that drive gambling addicts are also at work in email users. "Both slot machines and email follow something called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule'," he says, "which has been established as the way to train in the strongest habits. This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way. So with email, usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful - an invite out, or maybe some juicy gossip - and I get a reward." This is enough to make it difficult for us to resist checking email, even when we've only just looked.

The Streisand effect is a phenomenon on the Internet where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples are attempts to censor a photograph, a file, or even a whole website, especially by means of cease-and-desist letters. Instead of being suppressed, the information sometimes quickly receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks.[1][2] Mike Masnick said he jokingly coined the term in January 2005, “to describe [this] increasingly common phenomenon.”[3] The effect is related to John Gilmore's observation that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."[4]

reminds me of friend who keeps empty bottles from a high status winery in his wine cellar, and sometimes fills them with other wine

Some people are sensitive to how other see them, whilst others are not.
People who are high self-monitors constantly watch other people, what they do and how they respond to the behavior of others. Such people are hence very self-conscious and like to 'look good' and will hence usually adapt well to differing social situations.
On the other hand, low self-monitors are generally oblivious to how other see them and hence march to their own different drum.

Which is why CSE 484, an undergraduate computer-security course taught this quarter at the University of Washington, is so interesting to watch. Professor Tadayoshi Kohno is trying to teach a security mindset.
You can see the results in the blog the students are keeping. They're encouraged to post security reviews about random things: smart pill boxes, Quiet Care Elder Care monitors, Apple's Time Capsule, GM's OnStar, traffic lights, safe deposit boxes, and dorm -room security.

Analyzing reasons can focus people's attention on nonoptimal criteria, causing them to base their subsequent choices on these criteria. Evaluating multiple attributes can moderate people's judgments, causing them to discriminate less between the different

By leaving people the option of making bad choices Thaler and his cohort can deny the charge that they want the return of the nanny state. Their vision could be described as the au pair state: a more informal, less heavy-handed but still ever so slightly

"If attention is like a spotlight, then a good mood will widen that spotlight, while a negative mood will focus it very tightly," said Adam Anderson, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto in Canada and author of the study.

It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light.

some quotes from the net re Karl Weick's "small wins" observation

This means using short phrases with lots of repetition, and reflecting the child’s emotions in your tone and facial expressions. And, most awkward, it means repeating the very words the child is using, over and over again.

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity

the extent to which players are experiencing satisfaction of these needs can be quickly and objectively measured and show statistically significant relationships with enjoyment and immersion, as well as commercial outcomes such as ongoing subscriptions (d

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity

I know what negative thinking can do for reality and the bottom line is that if we all wish it hard enough, a significant downturn will appear. Let's make sure that we know what to wish for. I know that I wouldn't trade the Internet for anything, not even

Commitment and Consistency, Reciprocity, Social Proof, Liking, Authority, Scarcity

JWT, whose parent company is WPP, has come up with a new advertising category for people whose lives are so tied up with new technology. "We are calling them 'digitivity denizens,' those who see their cell phones as an extension of themselves, whose onli

When you advertise through an advertising network, your ads will get fewer fixations than if you contract directly with the publisher for a specific placement and design your creative to fit that spot. As a result, you should bid less for network ads than

time sink global associative wordplay

But we should worry about this psychology seeping too far into our lives. What if there were an application that could make it easier to pass on my love to a family-member? What if I no longer needed to read books in order to cite them, but could search t

just remember, Clay: old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill.

Through controlled experiments, Sonja Lyubomirsky explores ways to beat the genetic set point for happiness. Staying in high spirits, she finds, is hard work

jorn, the analogous version of this in sociology is ron burt's observation that "creativity is an import-export game" and his work on "structural holes" in social relations. same principle, pull things from one context and apply to another

A gratitude journal is a blank notebook where you write lists of things for which you are grateful. Every night, before you go to bed, you take about three minutes to write down a list of five things. (Or any do-able number.) Some days, you might be feeli

Gratitude is about so much more than being thankful. Gratitude is a practice. For some, it is a way of life. Why do some people swear by this practice? Why do those people live happier and more abundant lives than everyone else?

Gratitude. Consciously being grateful for what you have in your life. Expressing that gratitude to others. Accepting it from others.

Sure, we can have more sources of information. But in abundance, we will rely on our social networks as the filter. Good thing we keep passing the good stuff along so we can drop reading the rest.

the piece of your brain that fires when you are being altruistic

maybe some day I'll do these self-tests

friends don't let friends be level 60 paladins. why one WoW leet gamer gave it up at the top of his game, one year, 30 pounds heavier and minus the love of his life

write down the nicest things that happened to you every day, and why they happened. i'm starting to do this with walker tracker as the record keeping tool.

send this off to kathla

Achieving sustainable gains in happiness: change your actions not your circumstances.

small things, like keeping people in a good mood, have tremendous impacts on culture and performance in organizations.

on the symptoms and cure for environmentally-induced attention deficit disorder. a quick read.

10-point todo list.

UC Riverside researcher on happiness