Articles (page 15)

The popular version says people blame character and ignore the situation. The research is narrower: observers credit a person with traits that a visible role produced, the tendency is weaker in some…

Most people believe they can spot a liar by the eyes or the fidgeting. The pooled evidence puts human accuracy at 54 per cent, the cues people trust are largely absent, and the variation sits more…

People read their own actions as evidence about who they are, and some shade those actions to get good news. Whether an ordinary purchase does that work is a narrower question. The experiments come…

The question is usually asked about the dogs. The evidence answers a narrower one: what the 1967 experiments showed, and what their authors now say it meant. Learned helplessness holds up as a…

Students, public works and a curriculum team led by Daniel Kahneman all forecast the best case and ran late. The planning fallacy is the habit of planning from the imagined path and not from the…

The Stanford Prison Experiment is taught as proof that roles make ordinary people cruel. Sorted into three claims, the evidence supports the first, weakens the second and leaves the third contested.

Decision fatigue says each choice drains a mental tank and later choices suffer. The tank has failed a 36-laboratory test, and the best-known real-world case, Israeli parole rulings, has a rival…

A pair of eyes above an honesty box once made people pay 2.76 times as much for their milk. Pooled studies have not found the same lift in generosity, and the better case for watching eyes is a…

A brand can hold a legal right to a colour, but only to a named shade, on named goods, once buyers read it as a signature. Whether buyers do can be counted, and the two questions are answered in…