Tania Lombrozo

In a recent post at The Daily Beast, Will Wilkinson lambasts the field of psychology. His launching point is a recent paper by Nicholas Brown, Alan Sokal (of Sokal Hoax fame) and Harris Friedman that seriously challenges the math behind a much-touted claim in positive psychology: that ...

As a university professor, I've had the opportunity to view lectures from multiple vantage points. From the front of the room you see a sea of students — some attentive, a handful asleep and a good share semi-obstructed by the crisp plane of an open laptop.

The view is quite ...

Religious beliefs are often (though not always) comforting. The idea of an afterlife can be attractive. Ideas like fate and destiny — or simply things happen for a reason — can make it easier to cope with difficult situations. It's nice to think that humans have a purpose, that we ...

In my post last week, I wrote that "weak evidence is still better than no evidence." The statement prompted some thoughtful comments from readers:

I find that weak evidence is often worse than no evidence. (Chris Harlan)

Is weak evidence a positive or a negative? ...

I just learned something interesting about women in prison, and it wasn't by watching Orange is the New Black.

For the first time, researchers have investigated how actual prisoners — in this case female prisoners — respond to the "prisoner's dilemma," a famous conundrum used to model and ...

If you listened to All Things Considered last week, or happened to glance at The New York Times science section, you might have learned about a new language — Warlpiri rampaku or "Light Warlpiri" — created in a remote village in Northern Australia and documented by University of ...

In some sense we're all experts in emotion. We experience emotion every day, all the time. We constantly observe the emotional responses of others, and we often make decisions based on anticipated emotions: we pursue something because we think it will make us happy, or avoid something because we worry ...

If the proliferation of summer reading lists is any indication, summer is prime time for recreational reading, whether it's fiction or non.

NPR Books is well into a special series on summer books for 2013. Philosophy Talk, a Bay Area philosophy show (think Car Talk, but where ...

Would you wear a coat made entirely of male chest hair?

As part of an advertising campaign to cast a new chocolate milk drink as a "manly" beverage, the British branch of an international dairy company commissioned the "Man-Fur Coat," created from chest hair donated by 300 male ...

We often feel like our actions result from deliberate reasoning and explicit, carefully-orchestrated intentions, but psychologists have been telling us otherwise for decades.

Freud famously suggested that people's everyday speech and behavior betray unconscious ideas fighting for expression. A man's complexes, he wrote, are "what directs his conduct in ...

Last Friday I found myself in a lovely lecture hall at Brown University with some 50 philosophers and psychologists attending the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, affectionately known as "SPP." Daniel Dennett was in the seat just ahead of me; additional luminaries were scattered about ...

Modern medicine and technology can change the way we define our physical and psychological selves. Is a prosthetic arm "your own arm" in the same sense that its biological predecessor seemed to be? Might taking antipsychotic medication fundamentally change your personality? Could an organ transplant from a pig, or from ...

Should the United States impose unilateral sanctions on Iran for its nuclear program? Should we raise the retirement age for Social Security? Should we institute a national flat tax? How about implementing merit-based pay for teachers? Or establishing a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions?

Plenty of people have strong opinions ...

It's the end of the semester here at UC Berkeley, and I've got testing on my mind. I'm not the only one; across campus, instructors are engaged in the arduous task of grading quickly and fairly while students sigh with relief as they exit their final, final exams.

We most ...

Last week Eugenie C. Scott announced that she plans to retire from her role as executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), an Oakland-based not-for-profit that supports education concerning evolution and climate science, especially in public schools. Scott has been a major figure in debates ...

Dear reader,

Mother's Day is upon us and I'm here to share some news with you. While there's nothing wrong with a well-chosen gift, recent research in psychology suggests your time might be better spent writing a well-crafted card to mom.

A study by Toepfer, Cichy and Peters, ...

Last month, psychologist Jamil Zaki from Stanford University launched The People's Science (TPS), a forum dedicated to bridging the gap between scientists and the public.

"I've been a big proponent of science communication for a long time," Zaki told me in an email. He was motivated to start the ...

In a compelling New York Times piece published last Friday, writer Yudhijit Bhattacharjee discusses the rise and fall of Diederik Stapel, a Dutch social psychologist who committed fraud in 55, or more, of his scientific papers.

While I have very little sympathy for Stapel, I was surprised to recognize ...

Monday kicks off US VegWeek 2013, a campaign by Compassion Over Killing that invites people to go vegetarian for a week "to explore a wide variety of meat-free foods and discover the many benefits of vegetarian eating—for our health, the planet, and animals."

VegWeek got its start ...

A few days ago my two-year old asked to ride on my back ("Horsey!") while we were on Skype with her grandparents. She climbed onto my back and we started to plod around the living room. "I wonder how mummy feels about being a horsey?" asked my mother-in-law.

"Don't worry," ...