The Neuroscience of Intellectual Openness
How is it that some people feel energised by the thought of fierce debate and keen to have their beliefs challenged and their minds potentially changed, while others appear unwilling…
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Psychology
135 posts
Distorting Scientific Findings: Death by Press Release
Despite the current zeitgeist, in which many prefer to approach questions of fact through postmodernist analysis, other ways of knowing or lived experience—for many questions, there is no better source…
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When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment and Assault
The topic of David Buss’s new book, When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment and Assault, has scarcely ever been more relevant. It seems that, every…
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The Right to Remain Silent
But the danger [here] of words in their theoretical insignificance is perhaps that they claim to evoke the annihilation where all sinks always, without hearing the “be silent” addressed to…
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Working from Home: A Neuroscientific Perspective
A recent study by the multinational PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) shows that many companies want their employees back in the office faster than staff members would prefer. While 75% of the companies surveyed anticipate…
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Pretty Privilege
What is it like to be pretty? When we think of someone beautiful, we tend to assume that his or her looks privilege has to be accompanied by some negative…
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Should You Trust the Myers-Briggs Personality Test?
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It’s a favourite among Fortune 100 companies, government agencies and regular people. More than 1.5 million people…
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In Defense of Beauty
The famous column overlooking the town of Astoria, Oregon has had a long and chequered history. Immense human capital has been expended on the construction of this tourist attraction on…
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Salvaging Mental Health Amid the Covid-19 Pandemic
Mental health is health is an aphorism with which young Canadians have grown familiar over the past decade. The sentiment has been reiterated by high school teachers, professors, counsellors, family…
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Social Justice Culture and Toxic Femininity
Western culture, we’re told, is suffused with toxic masculinity. Traditionally masculine traits like strength, reticence and stoicism have degenerated into misogyny and violence, which now pervade our cultural norms and…
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Why Do Women Orgasm?
Researchers have long been fascinated by the female orgasm. It isn’t necessary for a woman to orgasm during sexual intercourse in order to become pregnant. By contrast, in men, orgasm…
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Deep Dive into the Big Five: Openness
We humans have been trying to understand ourselves for thousands of years, yet we remain as perplexed as the ancients were about the nature of consciousness. In fact, we are…
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What Happened to the Mental Health Crisis among Younger People?
Before Covid-19 struck, mainstream media were constantly raising the alarm about a mental health crisis among younger people. However, during this pandemic, the mantra protect the NHS has been drummed…
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Joseph Henrich’s “The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous”
Writing from Islamic Spain in 1068, scholar Said ibn Ahmad describes the different nations of the world. Some, like the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Egyptians, Indians and Jews, he writes, have…
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Combating Psychology’s Replication Crisis
Replicability is the ability to obtain consistent results across studies that use different data sets to address the same hypothesis. This allows us to determine whether a certain effect, e.g.…
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From Psychotherapist to Psychoactivist: How Therapy is Becoming Derailed
This is a public health warning: the seal on the tin labelled Counselling and Psychotherapy has been tampered with and the contents have become contaminated. Mainstream culture has been captured…
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Toxic Infantility and Its Social Consequences
“There is deep infantilism in the culture,” laments actor and comedian Stephen Fry. Indeed, the ways in which opinions are formed, framed and expressed today often reflect a troubling lack…
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Why Progressives Downplay Progress
“Intellectuals hate progress,” writes Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now. “Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress.” There are plenty of reasons to think Pinker is right. Many progressives seem…
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