Articles About psychology
The Feedback Intervention Effect: When Being Told Your Score Makes You Worse
Feedback helps on average, yet in over a third of studies people who got it did worse than people who got none. Where it sends your attention decides which.
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18 Sep
The Von Restorff Effect: Distinctive Items Survive, Similar Ones Blur
The story everyone tells puts a spotlight on the odd item. The woman whose name is on the effect argued something closer to the opposite about the crowd.
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9 Sep
The Serial Position Effect: The Middle of a List Disappears First
The curve is real and replicates in list after list. But the textbook account of half of it has been disputed since 1974, and the leftover is the good part.
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8 Sep
The Mere Exposure Effect: Familiarity Quietly Becomes Preference
Repetition really does make you like things more. What almost nobody reports is the list of conditions under which it stops working, or quietly runs backwards.
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6 Sep
Stereotype Threat: The Performance Cost of Knowing What Others Expect
The 1995 experiment everyone cites is sound. What almost everyone says it proved is not, and the thirty-year argument over that gap is the real story here.
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5 Sep
Goal Setting Theory: Specific and Hard Beats Do Your Best
The theory is usually taught as five principles with no numbers attached. Here are the numbers, and the failure mode built into the same mechanism.
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5 Sep
Resilience: Ordinary Recovery Rather Than a Rare Psychological Talent
Most people recover from the worst things that happen to them. The finding is solid. The number attached to it is not, and that difference changes what we do.
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29 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
Peer Pressure: Why the Presence of Friends Changes an Adolescent Brain
In the experiments that made this finding famous the friends were in another room and could not speak to the teenager at all. The risk taking went up anyway.
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23 Aug
