Every morning, as the waiting for Winston to decide continues to fray my fragile psyche, I can look at myself in the mirror, contemplate my own frenzied speculative hopes for an Ardern Prime Ministership, and immediately think of a host of strong social-methodological reasons why all such speculation is futile.
There’s a very good / depressing long read in The Guardian on the dangerous “weaponising” of cynicism by climate change deniers. One of the most interesting sections was a discussion of the way that voters are more forgiving of lies than hypocrisy.
Among the many failures of human cognition, we’re very poor at taking account of warnings of future risk and consequence. We’ve seen two particularly clear and strong examples of ignoring the warnings in NZ politics in the last two weeks. There are many other cases ongoing…
Do we really want search results tailored to our mood and intelligence? Are we going to take the most powerful aggregate of information ever assembled by humanity and bend it to our cognitive biases?
George Monbiot on the psychology of political debate (and why we’re all screwed).
Anyone who has been involved in debating issues has probably come to suspect that facts don’t matter. Facts don’t change people’s minds, there are other, stronger influences that shape opinions.
A recent article by George Monbiot in The Guardian reviews some of the psychological evidence for this fact blindness in the context of the climate change debate.
No, I haven’t abandoned my resolution to be less political on Sundays quite so soon. This post is about smells. Specifically, the effect […]
Diffusion of responsibility means that the bigger the group the less chance that anyone in the group will take action. In a typical […]
