Articles About psychology
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
Competition and Social Comparison: What Grading on a Curve Does to Learning
Festinger said people prefer an objective standard and compare themselves to others only when none exists. A curve removes it. That is the problem.
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23 Aug
Variable Reward Schedules: Unpredictable Payoffs Are the Hardest Habit to Break
Every explainer tells you unpredictable rewards are stickier. None says why, because psychology has argued about that since 1939 and has not stopped.
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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
The Pygmalion Effect: What a Teacher Believes Before Meeting You
A teacher's expectation moves a child most in the first days of term and almost not at all by the end of the month. That timing is the finding nobody quotes.
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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
Perfectionism: The Difference Between High Standards and Self-Punishment
Psychology measures perfectionism as two separate factors. The split explains why some people thrive on demanding standards and others are broken by them.
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22 Aug
