Category: Psychology
Events:
June 20, 2024
Examined Lives: Empathy (Session 45)
Our next session of Examined Lives will be a conversation about the nature of empathy.
January 18, 2024
Examined Lives: Judgment under Uncertainty (Session 40)
How do how humans make decisions under uncertainty?
Articles:
February 25, 2025
An Evolutionary Perspective on the Real Problem with Increased Screen Time
Human communication evolved face-to-face, but digital anonymity disrupts this natural social bond.
January 8, 2025
Is Shame a Bug or a Feature? An Applied Evolutionary Approach
Shame evolved to help us to maintain conscientious behavior, but in our modern world it may trigger avoidance and isolation.
October 26, 2023
Conservative Extremists Are Afraid of Threats That Don't Exist
Crucially, the pattern of heightened reactivity and credulity toward potential threats characteristic of the conservative mind is not associated with fearfulness or timidity, but with confidence in the ability to triumph through force.
July 23, 2023
Evaluating Narratives of Conscious Evolution
Every person is in a position to start consciously evolving their meaning systems for the groups in their own lives.
February 28, 2023
Where Do Librarians Fit in the Effort to Improve Mental Immunity?
Misinformation is an epidemic and librarians are the frontline workers.
February 21, 2023
Building Mental Immunity
Education will play a central role in strengthening the mental resilience of current and future generations.
February 16, 2023
A Tribalism Vaccine
At the core of human adaptation is the solution to the riddle of how a human mind, which was crafted to work with people we know, evolved the instinct to work with people we don’t. But there was a cost, and the result was a seemingly intractable paradox embedded in humanity’s moral compass.
February 14, 2023
Are Some False Beliefs Good For You?
Some psychologists champion what they call ‘positive illusions’, mild misapprehensions about ourselves that are conducive to health and happiness
February 9, 2023
Mental Immunity, The Group Mind, and Existential Fear
As a highly social species, humans have an evolved tendency to favor the ‘in-group.’ This trait significantly impacts our immunity, or lack of it, to false or harmful information.
February 7, 2023
Witch-Hunting: A Lethal Cultural “Virus”?
New research suggests there may have been Darwinian mechanisms behind the evolution of witch-hunting phenomena.
January 19, 2023
The Many Faces of Cognitive Immunology
Viewing minds through the lens of cognitive immunology can reveal antidotes to misinformation, disinformation, and information chaos.
January 12, 2023
Evolving My View on Mental Immunity
After initially accepting the metaphor of mental immunity as a useful gift from a cherished friend, my more deeply ingrained worldview now appears to be casting doubts upon it.
January 10, 2023
Changing A Belief Means Changing How You Feel: The Role of Emotions in Cognitive Immunology
Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there’s no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. - John Kenneth Galbraith
December 15, 2022
Bad Ideas Recruit the Mind’s Immune System to Protect Themselves
Some bad ideas get past a mind’s defenses and then hijack the mind’s immune system. These bad ideas recruit the mind’s defenses to protect themselves, even if that recruitment ends up harming the mind that hosts it.
December 13, 2022
The Analogy of/and Inoculation Theory to Mental Immunity
Models from epidemiology are increasingly used to better understand how misinformation spreads in online networks.
December 6, 2022
The Science of Mental Immunity Has Arrived
The emerging field of “cognitive immunology” may hold solutions to our world’s growing disinformation problems.
August 23, 2022
The Anxiety Epidemic in Children: What are the Causes?
Rates of anxiety and depression have been rising in children since the 1980’s and might have accelerated during the last ten years.
October 28, 2021
Will to Fight for the Future Can’t Be Bought
Only by understanding the psychology of sacred values can we predict the willingness to sacrifice for those values.
February 2, 2021
Does Competition Increase Trust?
Research shows that when a person moves into a more competitive industry their trust tends to increase.
January 26, 2021
Why Immigration Drives Innovation
U.S. immigration is but one example of how the interactions of many diverse minds—our collective brains—drive innovation and ultimately economic growth.
December 22, 2020
Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Symbolic Thought and Communication
Are there universal features of grammar and syntax?
December 18, 2020
Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Learning
Can variation and selection within a lifetime be thought of evolutionarily?
December 15, 2020
Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Introduction
This groundbreaking series of conversations seek to integrate Evolutionary Science and Contextual Behavioral Science with a larger audience.
August 4, 2020
Bringing Neuroscience and Sociology into Dialogue on Emotions to Better Understand Human Behavior
What this potential marriage suggests is there are great possibilities for research, particularly around social relationships.
March 6, 2020
The Taxonomy of Human Evolved Psychological Adaptations
PsychTable.org is an open-science taxonomy devoted to uncovering the richness and complexity of our evolved human behavior.
January 28, 2020
Is Evolutionary Psychology Impossible?
Subrena Smith recently argued that “evolutionary psychology, as it is currently understood, is…impossible."
January 15, 2020
Why Evolutionary Psychology (Probably) Isn’t Possible
Evolutionary psychologists have not shown that there are specific psychological programs that are written in the genetic foundation of our species. This is the challenge they must meet. Header image credit to ClaudeAI.uk
October 3, 2019
Seven Reasons Why Most Major Depression is Probably Not a Brain Disorder
If most MD, as it is currently diagnosed, is not a disorder, should we keep calling it Major Depression?
March 2, 2016
TVOL Special Edition: What’s Wrong (and Right) About Evolutionary Psychology?
This Special Edition features a diverse collection of articles on evolutionary psychology by proponents, critics, and scientists, with the aim to clarify the subject for everyone, from experts to the general public.
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