A Therapist’s Plea for Freedom of Speech
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.—Frederick Douglass. The single best predictor of a positive…
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Psychology
103 posts
The Why is Not the Same as the How: Levels of Analysis and Scientific Progress in Psychology
The emerald-colored jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) parasitizes the common cockroach with a sophistication that beggars the imagination. Here’s how the morbid scene unfolds. The wasp begins by injecting a venomous…
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The Purity of the Shitstorm
Photo by Kat Jayne Social media is messy: a raucous collision of strident opinions, banal brunch pictures, trolls, nudes, reactionaries, revolutionaries, memes and boomers credulously reposting chain letters. This mess is…
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Choosing the Final Freedom: Suicide in the Past and Present
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi During the Second World War, my mother’s sister was a liaison officer in the resistance movement. She performed very important clandestine work. As she said herself, she…
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The Debate Over Psychology’s Covid-19 Response
Although each of us has experienced the Covid-19 pandemic differently—what is a mere inconvenience for some has been utter agony for others—underlying our unique experiences are shared cognitive tendencies that…
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Wisdom vs. Authority in Science
The story of Abraham and Isaac is probably the most shocking example of submissiveness to authority in the written records of our civilization. However, this tragedy is rarely used as…
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The Viewpoint Hypothesis: Improving How We Define Left and Right
Image by Gerd Altmann It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. For a long time, people assumed…
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Game Theory and the Politics of Coronavirus
The coronavirus caught us off guard. Republicans blame China. Democrats blame Trump. President Trump blames Governor Cuomo and he slams Trump in return. Fox News defends the president’s actions, while…
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The Case for Agnostic Christianity
Thousands of people disengage from Christianity every year. Some have a crisis of faith and lose belief in God, the Resurrection, heaven or the existence of miracles. Others leave over…
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Covid-19 and the Coming Campus Mental Health Crisis
Photo by Andrik Langfield The psychological effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are severe, and underestimating them may be disastrous for our college campuses.In a Pew survey conducted in late March, 18%…
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Generalisations, Complicity and Jeff Goldblum
Image by Gage Skidmore Yesterday, Jeff Goldblum sparked controversy by asking Jackie Cox, a hijab-wearing contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race, whether there was something about Islam that was anti-woman and…
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Coronavirus and Social Interaction
Lenin once said, “There are decades in which nothing happens; and there are weeks in which decades happen.” Never has this quotation been more pertinent than now, during the Covid-19…
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Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson
If a laboring man has no land, no chance of making use of the right, so natural for every man, to obtain from the land his own means of support…
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The Coronavirus Won’t Change Us Much At All
Photo by Laura Ockel The global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus has changed the world. At least, that is what we are being told, day after day, by political pundits…
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Social Distancing: A Neurophilosophical Perspective
The COVID19 pandemic is poised to become the single most disruptive event of our generation. At the time of writing, the pandemic has already started to profoundly alter our ways…
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Human Responses to Contagion: Persecution, Blame, Compassion
On 26 February, it had already been several weeks since I’d started closely following the news of what’s been called the novel coronavirus (technically, the virus is SARS-Cov-2, and the…
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Italians Singing from Balconies
Murray Siskind, a character in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, once remarks that human beings form crowds as a “shield against their own dying” because “to become a crowd is…
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The Firing of Bo Winegard: When Academic Freedom and Outrage Collide
Image by Bwsmith84 at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10541370 The recent firing of Dr Bo Winegard, psychology professor at Marietta College, has sparked widespread debate in academia. His predicament…
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