An Orwelexicon for Bias and Dysfunction in Psychology and Academia They argued that “mansplaining” was just the “tip of the iceberg” and so coined terms such as “Himpediment,” defined as a “man who stands in the way of progress of women.” Lee Jussim 29 Jan 2020 · 4 min read
Complexity and Understanding Mutual misunderstandings run deep and at times prove to be dangerous. Travis Kirkwood 26 Jan 2020 · 4 min read
Can We Boost Empathy Through Perspective-Taking? One of the ways we have been taught to nurture empathy is by deliberately trying to take the perspective of a suffering person. Michael McCullough 21 Jan 2020 · 6 min read
Build Your Own Intellectual Oasis Live your own life, worry about your own problems, and let others worry about theirs. Bill Frezza 4 Jan 2020 · 6 min read
The Ranks of Gender Detransitioners Are Growing. We Need to Understand Why Until recently, those seeking transition generally were subject to extensive assessment by mental health practitioners. Lisa Marchiano 2 Jan 2020 · 8 min read
Scandinavia: Can The New "Parental Team" Replace Marriage? A 2012 statistical report profiled a cohort of 34,000 Swedish heterosexual couples who had their first baby in 2000, and followed their progress longitudinally until 2010. Mikael Jalving 2 Jan 2020 · 7 min read
The Availability Heuristic and Mass Shooting Fears Understanding this mental tick, and how it operates, provides us with a clear picture of the process that turns outlier events into sources of persistent worry. Evan Balkcom 29 Nov 2019 · 6 min read
The Danger Is Real: Why We’re All Wired for ‘Constructive Conspiracism’ In recent years, psychologists and political scientists have identified several factors that influence conspiratorial thinking, such as political orientation, race and power (or the lack thereof). These are proximate causes of conspiracism. Michael Shermer 31 Oct 2019 · 9 min read
The Dangerous Dream of Dismantling Human Hierarchies Most setups that might appear to be non-hierarchical are actually deeply hierarchical. Christoph Kletzer 13 Oct 2019 · 19 min read
The Misuse of Empathy Is Devaluing Pain Empathy is a fundamental human emotion that helps us to understand one another. Matthew Delaney 9 Oct 2019 · 7 min read
Against Determinism—A Brief Reply to Jerry Coyne The unambiguous conclusion seems to be that people are better off believing in either libertarian free will (which grants us complete agency) or the intuitive compatibilism (which grants us compromised agency) that they tend to favour. William Tomos Edwards 3 Sep 2019 · 5 min read
'Virtue Signalling' May Annoy Us. But Civilization Would Be Impossible Without It Virtue signaling includes the best of human instincts, and the worst of human instincts. Geoffrey Miller 2 Sep 2019 · 8 min read
Socialization Isn't Responsible for Greater Male Violence The evidence that men are more violent and more criminal than women is overwhelming, and yet it doesn’t imply that all men are violent, deserve to be incarcerated, or are undeserving of our sympathy or compassion if they are imprisoned. Alex Mackiel 26 Aug 2019 · 6 min read
Are Political Disagreements Real Disagreements? If partisanship is shaping our perceptions of reality, then democratic decision-making becomes incredibly difficult. Michael Hannon 20 Aug 2019 · 8 min read
Straw Men and Viewpoint Manicheanism Each “side” sees the other’s behavior as evidence of evil, and their own behavior as justified on the ground that we good folks must defend ourselves against them. Rick Repetti 14 Aug 2019 · 6 min read