As I sit here and watch my students work on their midterm exams, I feel guilty, and not just because they’re working hard. A study by Jean-Phillipe Chaput and his colleagues (2008) demonstrated that doing intellectually challenging work makes you eat more [1], and my students are likely to go Read more…
Social psychologists have known for a long time that how you present options heavily influences decisions. In one such study, people had a choice to earn $20, or to gamble for $50 and risk getting nothing. If you frame the “safe” choice as a $30 loss, people are more likely Read more…
My students are very aware that I have an unusually negative view of chemically altering the human nervous system (with, of course, the exception of my favorite drug of choice–caffeine). I think it’s just fair to let students know if you bring this type of bias into the classroom–sort of Read more…
As you may have noticed, I am experimenting with the use of Loneliness with my introductory psychology students. We’re doing a lot of out of class projects, but I also wanted to incorporate some in-class activities. Yesterday, we tried to apply one of the principles of improving social connection suggested Read more…
I confess to being a competent, but not at all accomplished dancer, in spite of my parents’ efforts in my childhood years to introduce me to ballet. Our instructor was a fairly frightening Frenchwoman, who dramatically used only her last name, Collinette. She seemed to us kids to be about Read more…