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The Public Benefits of Social Psychology
Dick Thaler (left) and Tim Wilson (right) After spending the better part of this week talking and writing about what needs to be fixed about social psychology, I thought it would be worth highlighting...
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Psychology is Science
I hope that most people who read Alex Berezow’s editorial in the Los Angeles Times denying that psychology is a science found it misinformed and bordering on absurd. All Berezow had to do to find...
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Just My Luck (or is it?)
I don’t think Michael Lewis was trying to make a political point when he gave the commencement address at Princeton University last month (watch the whole thing here). Lewis, the author of several...
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Simonsohn’s Fraud Detection Technique Revealed
Uri Simonsohn’s “secret” paper describing the analyses he used to detect fraud in the Dirk Smeesters and Larry Sanna cases has now been submitted for publication and is available on SSRN. It’s...
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Just Post It (update)
A quick update on the Simonsohn’s Just Post It paper – Friday’s post focused mostly on the steps Simonsohn took to avoid making false accusations and provided a link to the newly available paper so...
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Inescapable Karma
In the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review this week, A. J. Jacobs explains how he managed to write so many book “blurbs” that his agent and editor had to stage an intervention. It’s a short, fun read...
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Luck vs Merit (Part 2)
This weekend Robert Frank wrote about the respective roles of luck and skill in achieving success in this Economic View column in The New York Times. Frank’s piece hits on many of the same themes as...
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The Psychology of Soda Bans
I’ve been thinking a fair bit about paternalism recently, since as the father of a one-year-old I have to do a lot of paternalizing (apparently spell check and I disagree on whether that’s a word). In...
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Reform from the Bottom Up
In recent months social psychologists have focused an increasing amount of attention on the soundness of their scientific methods. Although the problems we face are troubling, I believe that the...
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Choosing Poorly
Anuj Shah There’s a really interesting new paper out in Science by my colleague Anuj Shah at Booth (the business school at the University of Chicago, where I teach). It explores how poverty can change...
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It’s the Thought that Counts (sometimes)
My first post for the Chicago Booth website has just gone up and I wanted to share the link — it’s called Using Behavioral Science To Pick The Perfect Holiday Gift. It’s on research by Yan Zhang and...
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The Science of Gifts
Source: Jason Ford for The Boston Globe Is it possible to get gifts down to a science? With gift giving season upon us, there has been a flood of advice for consumers on how to navigate their purchases...
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Narrowing the Achievement Gap with a Psychological Intervention
Important!This is a re-post of a story originally published as a guest blog at Scientific American MIND. Thanks to @BoraZ and @iwickelgren for their hospitality. Image courtesy of Alex de Carvalho...
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The Stapel Continuum
Diederik Stapel (Photo Credit: Jack Tummers) Along with many other psychologists, I’ve been closely following (and participating in) the ongoing discussion about finding ways to effectively improve the...
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Paul Rozin on Music, Food, and Sex
Paul Rozin I’m not sure how it’s possible that until yesterday I had never seen Paul Rozin speak. However it happened, I corrected a huge mistake by going to see him give an invited address at the...
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The Psychology of Nothing: Phantom Symptoms
“The Heart Attack” Season 2, Episode 10 Lovable anti-hero George Costanza is having a salad for lunch when he suddenly clutches at his chest and declares, “I think I’m having a heart attack!” His...
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Narrative Transportation
This is a draft of an article I submitted to Nautilus Magazine, a “new magazine on science, culture, and philosophy,” for their issue entitled In Transit. Nautilus already had plans to cover the...
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Odysseus Nudged: Some more thoughts
I wrote a piece for Big Think that came out on Monday and there were some additional thoughts that I wanted to share that didn’t make it into the original article. If you’ve already read the piece,...
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Pay Now Consume Later
This is a re-posting of my article from earlier today on my new blog at Big Think. As of this morning Random Assignment has a new home-away-from-home which you can visit here, but I’ll continue to post...
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BigThink Update
Although my plan was to cross-post my writing from Big Think here, I haven’t been doing it the past several weeks, so here’s an update on what I’ve been writing about recently, which I invite you to...
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