psychology

It is not difficult to extend the lessons I’ve learned in my virtual sessions to every couple in their own homes. My advice is to begin by not talking—literally learn to “mute” yourself. Pausing to actively listen is not our instinct; we…

But today there is a third city affecting the other two. Silicon Valley, this third city, is not governed primarily by reason (it is practically the mark of a great entrepreneur to not be “reasonable”), nor by the things of the soul (the…

On a snowy winter day, we were in the library of a charter middle school in Portland, Maine. It was the first of many school visits where we teamed up with teachers to try out classroom approaches for teaching thorny digital topics, from…

Why do people cheat? An intriguing study by two Israeli researchers in 2016 put forward a possible reason that has since become well established in the scientific literature and popular media. The researchers reported a series of…

One way of embracing this uncertainty is to adopt a stance of axiological open-mindedness toward the future. We can get a sense of what this might entail by considering how it works today. In his book, The Geography of Values, Owen…

In Aeon magazine, Hales wrote, “Luck might not be a genuine quality of the world at all.” Fine. But neither is beauty or justice. At the same time, the Bloomsburg researchers discovered “a significant positive correlation” between…

Shortly after I learned about Eliza, the program that asks people questions like a Rogerian psychoanalyst, I learned that I could run it in my favorite text editor, Emacs. Eliza truly is a simple program, with hard-coded text and flow…

Back in 2015, before Brexit, before Trump, before Macedonian internet trolls, before QAnon and Covid conspiracy theories, before fake news and alternative facts, the disagreement over the Dress was described by one NPR affiliate as “the…