Is making sense of a story more important than getting at its truth? Looking at the treatment of myth in ancient Greece may help us navigate what is true, and whether that matters.
Self-proclaimed gluten sensitivity is on the rise, and so is the stereotype that it goes along with being a politically correct progressive. But is gluten actually a good proxy for social values?
Sports fans see it all the time: two people arguing about a split-second difference in who did what. New research suggests human beings have a bias to perceive their own actions as happening sooner.
Media reports are starting to directly connect climate change to its weather effects in local communities. But how you respond to those linkages depends on what you already think about climate change.
It’s a psychological quirk that when something becomes rarer, people may spot it in more places than ever. What is the ‘concept creep’ that lets context change how we categorize the world around us?
Information on social media can be misleading because of biases in three places – the brain, society and algorithms. Scholars are developing ways to identify and display the effects of these biases.
Alberto Cardaci, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Catholic University of Milan
Under some circumstances, people may feel wealthier than they actually are and this makes them psychologically more prone to increase their spending, as well as their borrowing.
Cognitive psychologists know the way our minds work means we not only don’t notice errors and misinformation we know are wrong, we also then remember them as true.
Mental short-cuts guide our everyday decision-making. Unfortunately, five biases can lead us to deny responsibility for our poor decisions and are creating problems for share-bike schemes.
For 30 years, sports fans have been told to forget about streaks because the ‘hot hand’ is a fallacy. But a reanalysis says not so fast: Statistics show players really are in the zone sometimes.
Provost Professor of Psychology and Marketing and co-director of the Dornsife Mind & Society Center, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences