One of the ideas I’ve seen cropping up on social media and in media punditry is that polls are untrustworthy. Such skepticism about polls seems to me to be part of a broader assault on objective, systematic research that has been on the rise since 2016.
Classic theories of choice posit that our preferences are transitive. So, for example, if you prefer the apple to the orange and the orange to the banana, then you’ll also prefer the apple to the banana. Now one interesting question in psychology is the extent to which human preferences are actually transitive.
In 1729, Jonathan Swift published his satirical essay, “A Modest Proposal,” which offered selling babies for food as the simple solution to Irish poverty. But what if Swift had published a piece presented with the appearance of a legitimate news source, instead of clear satire? Would there be an easy way to tell it was fake news?
What makes people susceptible to fake news? Does reasoning tend to lead to less bias or more distorted beliefs? In other words, are people who are reflective more or less likely to be suckers for fake news? This question has resulted in a wide-ranging debate with two camps.
Actor Nikolaj Koster-Waldau is far better than Jaime Lannister, the character he plays on Game of Thrones. But he is sometimes criticized for portraying a character that normalizes depraved behavior. Which raises the question: is it immoral to produce fiction that represents bad behavior people might emulate?
I had a terrific time discussing religious “beliefs”—or religious credences, as I call them—with Josh and Ken recently. One claim I proposed on the show is that religious credence is like make-believe imagining. I want to delve a little deeper into that claim and address something Ken said.
Research shows both that increasing people’s knowledge of climate science does not increase acceptance of human-caused climate change, but teaching the mechanisms of how global warming works does strengthen acceptance. Is there a way to reconcile these seemingly conflicting results?
Why do people deny climate change? A common view is that such people reject science. But in most cases, it’s not all science they reject. After all, most climate deniers believe in electricity and that the earth goes around the sun. So what is going on? As I see it, there are at least five types of climate denier.
Ever since the replication crisis broke in 2011, a number of causes have been identified for why a psychological experiment might not replicate. I want to suggest a possible reason why a study might fail to replicate, one that seems to have been mostly overlooked, namely: lack of conceptual clarity about the phenomenon being measured.
The American Pediatric Association is clear that spanking harms children. In light of this information, it’s fair to say spanking children is immoral and those who spank in this day and age are doing wrong. But here’s a tricky question. How should our moral judgments of the present impact our judgments of what people did in the past?
A backlash to the #MeToo movement suggests if society’s default is to believe women who claim they were sexually assaulted, that will open men up to rampant false accusations, which women will exploit for malicious purposes. But the reality is that #MeToo promotes social habits that make men less likely to be susceptible to false accusations.
A question has plagued me since the latest cluster of scandals emerged from the Catholic church. The scandals are both about clergy who sexually abused young people and about the church hierarchy’s cover-ups. The question is this: do the priests who commit such abuses believe in God?
Conspiracy theorists think quasi-rationally, but their thinking only goes in one direction. Because conspiracy theorists are less analytic, their thinking tends not to override their starting intuitions. So how can we alleviate people’s tendencies to adopt irrational conspiracy theories?
You might think that conspiracy theorists like the flat earthers don’t really think about things. But if you’ve ever argued with one, you’ll find that they do. They have an answer for everything. So how do we reconcile their irrationality with their rational thinking?
Someone categorized as “a criminal” is likely to experience social ostracism, unlike people who break laws not associated with the word “criminal.” But we don’t call every single person who does a technically criminal act a “criminal.” So when is it appropriate to apply the label “criminal” to someone who breaks the law?
The so-called Law of Attraction, one of the cornerstones of New Age positive thinking, is a textbook case of what Dan Dennett calls a “deepity”—an ambiguous claim that on one reading is either true but trivial, on another is false but would be earth-shattering if true.