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Tag Archives: Psychology
Seven Thinking Errors You Probably Make
Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
1) Confirmation Bias – The confirmation bias is a tendency to seek information to prove, rather than disprove our theories…
2) Hindsight Bias – Known more commonly under “hindsight is 20/20“ this bias causes people to see past results as appearing more probable than they did initially…
3) Clustering Illusion – This is the tendency to [...]
On Being an Introvert
Monday, September 10th, 2007
Extroverts therefore dominate public life. This is a pity. If we introverts ran the world, it would no doubt be a calmer, saner, more peaceful sort of place. As Coolidge is supposed to have said, “Don’t you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit [...]
The Psychology of 911ist Politics
Friday, August 31st, 2007
In their experiments, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski make a good case that mortality reminders from September 11 enhanced Bush’s popularity through November 2004. But, on the basis of their research, it is possible to draw even broader conclusions about U.S. politics after September 11. Mortality reminders not only enhanced the appeal of Bush’s political style [...]
What exactly is General Semantics?
Friday, August 31st, 2007
General semantics, as any other symbolic environment, has its benefits and its difficulties.
The major focus of many self-avowed general semanticists today seems to me to be aimed at applying a relatively few static extractions related to prescriptions for how to behave. Unfortunately, this emphasis seems to be at the expense of an adequate understanding [...]
Distributed Cognition
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
[Distributed Cognition] is a theory of psychology developed in the 1990s by Edwin Hutchins. Using insights from sociology, cognitive science, and the psychology of Vygotsky (cf activity theory) it emphasizes the social aspects of cognition. It is framework (not a method) that involves the co-ordination between individuals and artifacts. It is comprised of two [...]
Examples of Sapir-Whorf
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
In Tzeltal, the general word for EAT is TUN, but it changes depending in what it is eaten: K’UX for beans, LO’ for bananas, WE’ for tortillas and bread, TI’ for meat and chilis, TZ’U’ for sugarcane and UCH’ for corngruel and liquids.
In Carrier, the general word for beaver is TSA, but a [...]
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Applied To Programming Languages
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is sometimes applied in computer science to postulate that programmers skilled in a certain programming language may not have a (deep) understanding of some concepts of other languages. Though it may equally apply to any area where languages are “synthesized” for specific purposes, computer science is especially fertile when it comes [...]
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Sunday, August 26th, 2007
In linguistics, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (SWH) states that there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. Although it has come to be known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, it rather was an axiom underlying the work of [...]
General Semantics
Sunday, August 26th, 2007
General Semantics is an educational discipline created by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) during the years 1919 to 1933. General Semantics is distinct from semantics, a different subject. The name technically refers to the study of what Korzybski called “semantic reactions”, or reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event — any event, [...]
Becoming What We “Are”
Sunday, August 26th, 2007
Essay from Robert Anton Wilson’s “Email to the Universe”:
If you stroll through a large art museum, you will notice that Van Gogh does not paint the same world as Rembrandt, Picasso does not see things the way Goya did, Georgia O’Keefe doesn’t much resemble Rivera, Salvador Dali looks like nobody but himself, and, in general, [...]
Monsters and Magical Sticks
Saturday, August 25th, 2007
I’ve recently finished reading Monsters and Magical Sticks by Steven Heller, which has some intriguing ideas in it about psychology, hypnotism, and the way that our brains work. (The editing is a little patchy, like some other New Falcon titles that I’ve read in the past, e.g. Christopher Hyatt books, so there are some [...]
Erickson on Everyday Trance
Saturday, August 25th, 2007
Erickson believed that the unconscious mind was always listening, and that, whether or not the patient was in trance, suggestions could be made which would have a hypnotic influence, as long as those suggestions found some resonance at the unconscious level. The patient can be aware of this, or she can be completely oblivious that [...]
How the Subconscious Affects Your Behaviour
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007
In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.
The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers [...]