Why We Look

Explorations in ethics, metaphysics, and the examined life

• Why You and I See Different Colours

  The dress photograph exposed individual differences in colour constancy. People fall back on different default assumptions about the light. It does not reveal a personality type.

• Both Sides of the Screen-Time Argument

  Our position is in the first paragraph. What follows is the evidence for it, both writers on their own terms, and the objection we cannot answer

• The Candle Never Changes

  Why the room decides what counts as art

• Willpower Is Not a Fuel Tank

  The resource theory of self-control shrank to almost nothing, and the belief theory brought in to replace it does not replicate either

• Wanting Is Not Liking

  Engagement measures wanting more readily than it measures liking, and the two are not the same system

• What Forty-One Participants Buys

  Social priming's best defence is that the instrument was too blunt for the claim. Fifteen years on, nobody has built a sharper one