I read a lot of pop psychology nonfiction which means I get reintroduced to a lot of intro psych concepts. For example, the representativeness heuristic is the idea that people tend to overestimate the likelihood that a situation will reflect a "representative" or stereotypical example, like when we see an argumentative toddler and predict she'll ( Read more... )

My most recent pop psychology book is The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. The thesis, which I haven't really seen explored elsewhere, is that sometimes having more choices can make you feel less free--or at least less satisfied with the outcome of your choices. It's really more the "counterintuitive results of choice" than a paradox, but it is ( Read more... )

I'm reading another popular psychology book on the human brain/cognitive error, because for some reason I find them comforting: Why We Make Mistakes by Joe Hallinan, who despite his Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting seems to be not quite as compelling a storyteller as Jonah Lehrer. Perhaps his organization of the material just isn't as ( Read more... )

I'm reading Jonah Lehrer's* "How We Decide" (forget "Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me," that's so yesterday), a nonfiction book about decision-making and the brain which was featured and provided many of the stories on the excellent Radio Lab about choice. So far in the book, Lehrer has explained that our internal, faster-than- ( Read more... )

At work I'm dealing with a math text which contains word problems like the following:

In designing an industrial robot, an engineer calculates the number of teeth needed for each gear with the expression PN + 2P. Factor this expression.Is it just me, or does that seem like the most phoned-in word problem ever? It's like they heard somewhere that ( Read more... )