Fear of spiders may trace back to scorpions
Psychologists find that spider fear can run in families, that spiders alone rarely cause it, and that scorpions may help explain why it is so common.
category archive
Psychology.
How we interpret experience, tell our stories and understand each other.
A 1945 magazine feature set off the Skinner baby-box myth
B. F. Skinner built a heated crib for his daughter Deborah. A 1945 magazine feature and a confusion with the Skinner box turned it into a false legend.
How psychologists study the flow state
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found flow by interviewing climbers, dancers and writers. Fifty years on, labs still struggle to catch it.
Why grief refuses to run on a schedule
Grief has no fixed timetable. Many people never move through the five stages, and expecting grief to end on time causes its own pain.
James Flynn found IQ scores rising for decades
James Flynn found IQ scores rising by about three points a decade across nearly thirty countries, a shift too fast for genes to explain.
Seven in ten adults may feel like a fraud at least once
Imposter syndrome is the belief that your success is undeserved. It is not a diagnosis, and research suggests around 70% of adults feel it at some point.
A rubber hand can start to feel like your own
Seeing a fake hand stroked in time with your hidden real one makes the brain claim it. It works only if the fake hand sits where a real arm could.
Your taste in music may owe something to Pavlov's dogs
Ivan Pavlov's drooling dogs showed that one event can come to signal another. The same learning shapes human fears, likes and loyalties.
A grandmaster's chess memory relies on patterns, not pieces
Grandmasters recall real chess positions at a glance because they store patterns, not pieces. Scramble the board and the advantage all but vanishes.
Eyewitness memory holds up only if tested once, says Wixted
A witness's first identification, taken early and carefully, can be reliable. Every test after that risks changing what they remember.
Most volunteers gave shocks they believed could kill
Stanley Milgram ran his Yale obedience experiment as Adolf Eichmann stood trial claiming he had followed orders. Most volunteers obeyed.
Harry Harlow's monkeys preferred a cloth mother to a wire one
Harry Harlow's infant rhesus monkeys fed from a wire mother, then went straight back to cling to a cloth one. Comfort, not milk, drew them.
Why Jung broke with Freud, and the school he built after
Carl Jung rejected Freud's view that all motivation is sexual and the unconscious purely personal. After the split he founded analytical psychology.