One of the most famous figures in psychology is the following:

The moral of the following story is that philosophy is great, but check with a lawyer before applying it to the real world.

After my first foray into computational simulations successfully predicted that losses should loom larger than gains, at least when the stakes are high, I decided to take on an even more complicated phenomenon in psychology and economics: risk aversion.

Here is another insightful experiment from Tversky and Kahneman:

In a discussion of flight training, experienced instructors noted that praise for an exceptionally smooth landing is typically followed by a poorer landing on the next try, while harsh criticism after a rough landing is usually followed by an improvement on the next try. The instructors concluded that verbal rewards are detrimental to learning, while verbal punishments are beneficial.

It's not clear from the description whether the instructors considered whether their lesson plan would be beneficial to morale, but in any case, they were almost certainly wrong.

An important part of the admission process to a competitive college is the admissions interview. I'm against it. And that isn't just because interviews were originally instituted to keep Jews out of Harvard. It's because they are poor predictors of future performance and, even worse, they are poor predictors that people weight very heavily.

Losses loom larger than gains. This useful mnemonic describes an odd experimental finding: if you have people rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how unhappy they would be to lose $100, that rating will be higher than if you ask them how happy they would be to win $100.

It is well-known that infants learn their native languages with incredible ease. I just came across a passage that puts this into particularly striking context:

ABC news is running story about talking to your baby. They start with some alarming news: You may not be talking to your baby enough. How much you talk to your baby affects everything from school performance to IQ. They suggest that an optimal amount is 30,000 words per day. They even peddle a new device that will count how many words you say to your baby so that you know if you are hitting that magic 30,000, or even the "more realistic" 17,000.

Does it really matter how much you talk to your baby?

We use lots of different types of information to understand what people are saying: Word order, general knowledge, intonation, emotion... and plausibility. If you hear a restaurant employee ask, "Can I bake your order?" you know that the resulting interpretation is implausible. It would be much more plausible to ask, "Can I take your order?"

We are starting a new research project looking into how and when such information is used.

A paper in Nature Neuroscience made a big splash last week by purporting to show activity in the brain related to muscle movement starts up to ten seconds before the person is consciously aware of having made a decision to move. This could mean that free will is an illusion. Or does it?