The Power of “Familiar Yet Different”

September 18, 2020

When trying new things, what we like (or benefit from) most is usually familiar to us, yet somehow also distinct. 1. Music: we prefer songs that are similar to others we like but that feel novel. If a song is too similar to what we know, then it's derivative or boring (like listening to the same music on loop), but if it's too novel, it is usually unappealing or dissonant. Music from other cultures can be hard for us to appreciate until we've listened to enough of it. 2. Learning: we lear...

Bias based on facial attractiveness

July 2, 2020

There's a deeply-rooted, incredibly superficial aspect of human nature that is rarely discussed: our obsession with small variations in bone structure/skin smoothness on a person's face. At extremes, people are desired or shunned due to tiny, otherwise almost meaningless facial details. In the attached image, there are two non-existent women (generated by a face generation AI set to generate "brown hair white adult female"). If these were real people, they would likely be treated differently...

The Relationship Between Personality and Life Satisfaction

November 16, 2018

What's the relationship between personality and life satisfaction? We took a stab at figuring it out! We conducted a study of 999 people in the United States; recruited through our study platform at Positly.com. We looked for a correlation between 18 different personality traits (each trait being assessed with two questions) and life satisfaction. We examined the association each trait had with scores on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (a 5 question scale by Diener, Emmons, Larsen, Griffi...

Finding Our False Beliefs

September 7, 2011

By definition, we believe that each of our beliefs is true. And yet, simultaneously, we must admit that some of our beliefs must be wrong. We can't possibly have gotten absolutely everything right. This becomes especially obvious when we consider the huge number of beliefs we have, the complexity of the world we live in, and the number of people who disagree with us. The trouble though is that we don't know which of our many beliefs are wrong. If we knew that, we should have stopped believing th...

(Almost) Everything is Uncertain

August 23, 2011

If you try to enumerate all of the things that you know with absolute, 100% certainty, you will find that the list is very small. You know that “something” exists. If you have mental experiences, then you know that “you” exist (though coming up with a reasonable definition for what “you” means can be remarkably tricky). If your mental experiences are varied, then you know that whatever exists creates varied mental experiences. With some cleverness, you may be able to add to this list ...

Predicting Using the Past

August 19, 2011

When we try to predict how long a task will take, we are in danger of falling prey to the planning fallacy. This is the natural human tendency to underestimate how long your own projects will take and the costs involved. To give one of many possible examples, when a group of students were asked to estimate how long their senior theses would take if everything went as poorly as it possibly could, the average estimate was about 49 days. In fact, the average time it took the students to complete t...

Careful Analysis vs. Automatic Processing

August 12, 2011

Thinking very carefully about problems can be an extremely powerful way to answer questions or make predictions. But there are some problems for which our non-conscious processing systems produce superior results. Our non-conscious systems primarily work using pattern recognition. Through a combination of genetic pre-programming and repeated exposure, your brain learns to label instances of things in the world as "dangerous" or "not dangerous", "food" or "not food", "person" or "not person", ...

Keeping Ideas at a Distance Using Probability

August 11, 2011

We often talk about ideas by using phrases like "I believe X." But what do we mean when we say that we "believe" in an idea? Do we mean that we have 100% confidence that the idea is true? Let's hope not. Even statements that we all would say we very strongly believe, like "tomorrow the sun will rise", and "I am not a robot" we should not assign 100% probability to. While we can be very, very, very certain that the sun will rise tomorrow and that our brains are not computers, we cannot be abso...

Agencies Are Not Agents

August 5, 2011

People will often debate questions like "why did the U.S. invade Iraq?" One group claims it was due to a fear of nuclear weapons. Another group claims that the action was oil related. Yet another claims that George Bush had a vendetta against Saddam. But proposed answers like these often seem to assume something that isn't likely to be true: that there was a single reason why this action occurred. It is in fact not even clear that there was one predominant or overarching reason. The actions o...