Quote of the Day
“When many remedies are proposed for a disease, that means the disease is incurable.”
-Anton Chekhov
“When many remedies are proposed for a disease, that means the disease is incurable.”
-Anton Chekhov
I have conducted a number of studies on a phenomenon sometimes referred to as emotional adaptation. The basic idea behind this phenomenon is that people often respond with strong emotions to significant changes in their circumstances, but these emotions tend to diminish over time. Moreover, people often fail to anticipate this change in emotions, a failure…
If you ever want to know why one is the loneliest number, consider the words of John Tukey, a prominent American mathematician from the 20th century. Not the most socially adept person in the world, he relied heavily on his wife Elizabeth to help them live a normal life. When she died in 1998 Tukey…
Not long ago, I had the pleasure of reading Fooling Houdini, by Alex Stone. It is a marvelous book, part memoir about how his obsession with magic pulled him away from his career in physics, but also a wonderful explanation of the psychology of how magic works its wonders. Get rid of all those images…
I recently read Margalit Fox’s wonderful book, “The Riddle of the Labyrinth,” which tells the extraordinary tale of how three people, working in parallel, figured out the meaning of what, to me, look like random scribbles on ancient tablets – the language known as Linear B. In trying to deduce the riddle of these scribbles,…
“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.” (Click here to view comments)
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…