I just came across an interesting article in Slate contending that we often perceive handsome men to be jerks because examples of jerky handsome men come more easily to mind than examples of jerky plain men. In the case of single women, the “acceptable” men that they consider entering into relationships with tend to be better…
It all comes down to willpower, right? Strength of purpose. Muster the resolve to skip dessert, and you have a shot at losing that spare tire hanging off your belly. Succumb to your temptations, however, and you are simply being weak. But is it just weakness that causes us to overeat? A study in Psychological Science suggests…
“It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Internet is a post office, newsstand, video store, shopping mall, game arcade, reference room, record outlet, adult book shop and casino rolled into one. Let’s be honest: that’s amazing. But it’s amazing in the same way a dishwasher is amazing—it enables you to do something…
Behavioral science has taught me that subtle environmental cues can have a surprisingly strong influence on people. I don’t know if the following cue was purposeful or not, but the relative size of these two receptacles – the blue one being the recycling one of course – definitely sends a strong signal about how much…
The surgeon told the Weindel family that the operation had gone well. He had taken Dale Weindel’s stomach and cut it into two, and rerouted his small intestines so that all the food Weindel ate would now pass through the smaller portion of his stomach. He had given Weindel a “gastric bypass” operation, the best…
In recent posts, I’ve presented several interesting pictures of how arbitrary thresholds influence behavior. I showed how airplane pilots speed up flights to make on-time arrivals, but don’t speed up late flights that won’t make it on time. I’ve shown that the price of used cars changes when the mileage on the odometer passes arbitrary round…
According to a Gallup Poll, 1 in 4 people who are dependent on alcohol (they scored 20 or more on the World Health Organization’s Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test — AUDIT) think their drinking is average or less average. It seems that beer goggles don’t just make OTHER people look better! (Click here to view…
Most of us have at least one cranky old relative who not only has stronger opinions than the rest of us, but is also convinced that those opinions are superior to ours. Not just content to believe that, say, voter ID laws are a good idea, this relative is also derisive of anyone with a…
I spoke the other day to Melissa Dahl, a writer for New York Magazine. She wrote a really nice piece on what medical professionals call “contralateral prophylactic mastectomy” – when a woman with breast cancer chooses not only to remove the affected breast, but also the unaffected breast in order to reduce the chance of…
Sometimes people flat out need cameras shoved down into their stomachs. A long history of reflux disease, for example, could prompt a gastroenterologist to perform an “upper endoscopy”—to run a thin tube down the patient’s throat in order to view their esophagus and stomach and look for signs of serious illness. Medicare has correctly decided…