QUOTES

William Feller
Intuition leads to an erroneous picture of the probable effects of chance fluctuations.

Adrian Furnham & Michael Argyle
One of the most neglected topics in the whole discipline of psychology is the psychology of money.

Karl H. Pribram
Modern physicists and modern perceptual psychologists have converged onto a set of issues that neither can solve alone.

ARTICLES

Communicating with Caliban
by H.J. Eysenck
Reducing man to the status of a machine...

Neural Markers of Religious Conviction
by Michael Inzlicht et al
Religious conviction provides a framework for understanding and acting within one’s environment, thereby acting as a buffer against anxiety and minimizing the experience of error. (click here for full-text pdf)

Social Traps
by John Platt
The social traps represent all of our most intractable and large-scale urban, national and international problems today.

Born Under a Lucky Star?
by Nobuyuki Hanaki, Alan Kirman and Matteo Marsili
People can learn to behave in a way which makes them unlucky or lucky. (full text pdf)

Mirror Neurons
Society for Neuroscience
The ability to instinctively and immediately understand what other people are experiencing has long baffled neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers alike. Recent research now suggests a fascinating explanation: brain cells called mirror neurons.

The Tyranny of Choice
by Barry Schwartz
Logic suggests that having options allows people to select precisely what makes them happiest. But as studies show, abundant choice often makes for misery. See also Conant & Ashby.

Foundations for a New Science of Learning
by Andrew N. Meltzoff et al
New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices. (full text pdf online)

A Theory of Causal Learning in Children
by Alison Gopnik et al
Children use specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate "causal map" of the world: and abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. (full text pdf)

Penn Biologists Show That Generosity Leads to Evolutionary Success
A mathematically based explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature.

BOOKS

The Child's Conception of Physical Causality: Summary and Conclusion
by Jean Piaget
Theory of the development a child's understanding of itself and the world.

DEMONSTRATIONS

Michotte Demonstrations
Flash animation illustrating issues in the perception of causality.

INTERACTIVE WEBSITES

Can You Behave Randomly?
An online excercise designed to deepen your understanding of what randomness is by having you try to behave randomly.

LINKS TO BOOK DESCRIPTIONS

Statistics in psychology: an historical perspective
By Michael Cowles
A balanced, but not uncritical, view of the utility of statistics can be arrived at from a consideration of the forces that shaped the discipline and an examination of its development. (Link to the book on amazon.com)

SUMMARIES

Inequality of Man,
by H.J. Eysenck
Substantial support for the Iron Law of Inequality argued by one of the most famous and prestigious psychologists.

VIDEOS

The neurons that shaped civilization
VS Ramachandra
The mirror neuron system allows us to rethink issues like consciousness, representation of self, and even things like the emergence of culture and civilization.

Guilty By Association
B. F. Skinner on operant conditioning and free will: "By discovering of the causes of behaviour we can dispose of the imagined internal cause."

The Paradox of Choice
by Barry Schwartz
Choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied. (See also Conant & Ashby and Thouless (pdf))

How stats fool juries
by Peter Donnelly
Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly reveals the common mistakes humans make in interpreting statistics – and the devastating impact these errors can have on the outcome of criminal trials.

LINKS

Interactive: How a Toddler Learns to Talk
A graphic illustrating the rate of children's vocabulary growth, measured in new words used per month.

The Psychology of Inequality
The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School
Material from a conference on the psychological causes and consequences of social inequality.