Social Science Space

We are “less aware of the reasons for our choices than we think we are,” Petter Johansson and his partner Lars Hall have determined, and reasoning, as we call it, is often conducted post hoc.

Sales promotions usually list the discount before the restriction. But is this “good news then bad news” structure really the best practice?

Social psychologists David Dunning of the University of Michigan and Justin Kruger of New York University, whose research captured the public imagination by suggesting that unskilled people often overrate their own abilities, have received the 2023 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Psychology.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, explains David Dunning, comes when “people who are incompetent or unskilled or not expert in a field lack expertise to recognize that they lack expertise. So they come to conclusions, decisions, opinions that they think are just fine when they’re, well, wrong.”

The authors explored whether there are universal sound patterns in profanity. So we designed a series of studies involving speakers of different languages and found surprising patterns in how swear words sound across the world.

In the previous blog we learned about the type of psychogeographical thinking which was developed by Guy Debord and Situationist International. The latter movement was centered on France and mainland Europe in the immediate decades after World War II. Ultimately they failed to get their message through to wider society. In this article I explore how their basic principles re-emerged as a new form of psychogeography in the British Isles. This form would be less political than the work of Debord, at least on the surface, and would be championed by poets, writers of historical fiction and other forms of literature.

In this series Aled Singleton explore the ebb and flow of geographical ideas, particularly how they move around the world. As with all innovations, concepts sometimes lose traction over time, seem to get buried in dusty libraries and then fins themselves revived for unexpected reasons. The topic for this series is the concept psychogeography. We will travel from Paris in the 1960s to the UK in the 1990s and then to the wider World in the 2020s.

Think of a time when you felt vulnerable. Perhaps you were in a hospital corridor, or an exam hall, about to be tested. Now, focus on the building you were in. What if, without you knowing, the design of that space was affecting you?

An academic paper that asserts you can present nearly any research finding as significant would be widely read and cited has received more that 4,000 citations since it was published in 2011.

the authors’ research finds that, far from being immune to the conditions they treat in others, psychologists grapple with mental health difficulties or illnesses just as much as their patients do.

Liz Cooper explains the motivation behind the paper she co-wrote with Ben Marder, “Role morality discrepancy and ethical purchasing: exploring […]

This interactive timeline of some of the most important achievements in the field of psychology field as presented at the Introduction to Psychology […]