Anattā

What superpower best represents you? What’s your Greek God name? Which character from Game of Thrones are you? What can your star sign predict about your relationships? What are your core personality traits? Who is your ideal lover? Who are you? Who are you?

The Intolerance of Understanding

Let’s say that at some point in the next week, we discovered how to travel back in time. Let’s say we bring our smartphones with us to show the old world.

How would we explain them?

Social Cognition: Part 1

“People don’t just receive external information; they also process it and become architects of their own social environment” – Markus and Zajonc (1985)

Imagine yourself in a new environment full of people you’ve never met. For most, this is a stressful situation. Interacting with people without knowing how they see and interpret the world carries a fair degree of uncertainty, and therefore, vigilance.

Self-Confessed Experts

There is an idiom that sometimes pops up on social forums about ‘incompetent people being too incompetent to recognise their own incompetence’.

While often used as a catch-22 to win Internet arguments, it does have some grounding in reality, as over-estimations of competence are surprisingly common in all fields of knowledge.

False Causation

What do horoscopes, psychic perceptions, and palm reading have in common? The Barnum effect, in which we falsely believe that certain statements are tailored especially for us, but in reality could apply to a general population.

A particularly interesting example of this surrounds lunar cycles, a myth that exists to this day. The lunar effect, as it’s known, is the belief that certain events occur more frequently when there is a full moon. Why do we believe this?