4."When the pandemic started, a friend of mine got really obsessed with the fact that you can't leave your home or go near people without a mask — but it never reflected in his own actions. He judged ...

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I have been struck in several recent conversations by how clever our minds are at deceiving us, warping reality to fit our preconceived notions of what kind of people we believe ourselves to be. These ...

In the Aesop’s fable, the fox tries hard to get his hands on a tasty vine of grapes, but fails in all of his attempts to acquire the grapes; at which point the fox convinces himself that he really ...

This post was updated March 1 at 8:32 p.m. When was the last time you procrastinated? Are you doing it right now? For many college students, procrastination is one of the most common examples of ...

Cognitive dissonance is what happens when a person holds two sets of beliefs at odds with each other. The human brain doesn’t like logical inconsistencies, so someone experiencing cognitive dissonance ...

In 1934, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern India, killing thousands and devastating several cities. Curiously, in areas that were spared the worst destruction, stories soon spread that an even ...

If nations can suffer from cognitive dissonance just as individuals can, it’s easy to see why we elected Donald Trump. A good place to start thinking about this is football: As I often do in late ...

My sophomore year in college (1986-7) I had a RD (resident director of my dorm) who had a significant impact on me. He was a 24-year-old Psychology graduate student. He was tall, Italian and liked to ...