Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: psychologist

  • TED Talk: Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality

    What makes you, you? Psychologists like to talk about our traits, or defined characteristics that make us who we are. But Brian Little is more interested in moments when we transcend those traits — sometimes because our culture demands it of us, and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves. Join Little as he dissects…

  • Renowned

    Saw a Facebook post claiming “… a renowned psychologist believes that…” which made me curious. Such a psychologist ought to have thousands of academic journal citations. So, I looked up the name on Google Scholar and saw one to five. The most highly cited stuff was about metaphysical stuff that psychologists refute. Roy F. Baumeister is what…

  • TED Talk: Demise of Guys

    For a few weeks The Demise of Guys by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan has occupied a corner of my attention. It started when a friend posted about the Reddit AMA: I am a published psychologist, author of the Stanford Prison Experiment, expert witness during the Abu Ghraib trials. AMA starting June 7th at 12PM (ET). I even bought…

  • The origins of pleasure

    Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists — that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is. One interesting thing is…