Articles About cognitive science
Productive Failure: Why Solving It Wrong First Makes the Lesson Stick
The best experiment against this method tested ten-year-olds. The meta-analysis for it says the effect reverses at that age. Neither side cites the other on it.
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23 Aug
Latent Learning: The Rats That Learned a Maze Without Any Reward
The man who ran the first experiment and named the effect was not Tolman. There were four groups, not three. And the finding never did break behaviourism.
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23 Aug
Impostor Syndrome: The Achievers Who Believe They Fooled Everyone
Every confident number you have read about impostor syndrome is an artefact of which questionnaire somebody used and where they drew the line.
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22 Aug
Conformity: The Experiment Where People Denied What Their Own Eyes Saw
Asch called it a study of independence. Most of his participants stayed independent under pressure, and the textbooks quietly dropped that half.
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22 Aug
Delayed Gratification: What the Marshmallow Test Measured Besides Willpower
The most quoted result in the story rests on thirty-five children in one of four conditions. In the other three conditions the correlation ran the wrong way.
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22 Aug
Procrastination: The Mood Repair Strategy That Costs You Tomorrow
Putting something off is not a failure of discipline. It is a fast way to stop feeling bad, and the bill goes to a version of you that does not exist yet.
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21 Aug
The Bystander Effect: Why Help Is Less Likely When More People Watch
The effect is real and the story that made it famous was not. How much the size of a crowd matters turns out to depend on how unclear the moment looks.
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16 Aug
Learned Helplessness: The Famous Experiment Its Own Author Later Corrected
The 1967 experiment is famous. What almost nobody mentions is that the researchers behind it later published a paper calling their own interpretation backwards.
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16 Aug
Confirmation Bias: How Your Brain Defends What It Already Believes
The famous experiment behind confirmation bias does not show what it is famous for showing. Once you see why, almost everything downstream changes.
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15 Aug
