Articles (page 34)

A randomised trial put three breathing patterns against mindfulness meditation for five minutes a day over a month. The breathing arms won, and the technique everybody has heard of was not the one…

Red does not lower your IQ and it does not make you more attractive. The theory underneath those claims is in better shape than the claims are, and the most cautious voice in the field belongs to…

The colour of the cup changes what the coffee tastes like, and that is not a party trick. Here is the twenty-year research programme behind it, the restaurant study that tested it properly, and why…

Anchoring is real, it is one of the best replicated findings in psychology, and the researchers who study it do not agree about how far it stretches. Here is the theory, the dissent, and what we…

Memory is supposed to keep the best moment and the last one and bin the rest. The only study that has tested that on a real holiday found the middle was never voted down. It had gone before the vote

The gap between the two voices is real and it has been measured, though what got measured is not the thing you can feel, and the popular explanation for it does not survive checking

The pre-ticked box is the most powerful thing on the page, and the evidence for it has just been through the roughest audit the field has seen. Here is what survived, what did not, and what to ask…

The hour is folklore. The night is real, and what it does to a thought that will not stop has been measured better than most people realise

Open plan was sold on collaboration. When somebody finally measured it with sensors instead of surveys, face-to-face interaction fell by about seventy per cent. Here is that finding, its limits, and…