Essay/Social Psychology Microaggressions? Prejudice remains a huge social evil but evidence for harm caused by microaggression is incoherent, unscientific and weak Scott O Lilienfeld
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Stories & Literature So I exaggerate a little – am I wrong to jazz up my stories? Andrea Askowitz
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Cognition & Intelligence How totalism works The brainwashing methods of isolation, engulfment and fear can lead anyone to a cult. I should know – I was in one Alexandra Stein
Essay/Social Psychology The crisis of expertise Experts are either derided or held up as all-seeing gurus. Time to reboot the relationship between expertise and democracy Tom Nichols
Essay/Personality First impressions count A judgment of competence is made in a tenth of a second on the basis of facial features. Thus political decisions are made Alexander Todorov
Essay/Epidemiology Who names diseases? Swine Flu, Naples Soldier, Ebola. Disease names express fear, create stigma and distract attention. Can they be improved? Laura Spinney
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Cognition & Intelligence What know-it-alls don’t know, or the illusion of competence Kate Fehlhaber
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Cognition & Intelligence Our world outsmarts us Social problems are fantastically complex, while human minds are severely under-engineered. Is democracy doomed? Robert Burton
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Wellbeing If money can make you happy, does debt make you sad? Cassondra Batz
Essay/Consciousness & Altered States What lurks beneath The grand drama of Freud’s ideas has obscured the reality: every school of psychology needs a theory of the unconscious Antonio Melechi
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Stories & Literature Watchers of the earth Indigenous peoples around the world tell myths which contain warning signs for natural disasters. Scientists are now listening Carrie Arnold
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Illness & Disease How a generation of consumptives defined 19th-century Romanticism Michael Barrett
Essay/Neuroscience Touched We ride a stream of naked neurons, stripped of their sheaths, to the most blissful moments and deepest intimacies of life Steven M Phelps
volume_up play_arrow pause Essay/Human Rights What do slaveholders think? It is everywhere illegal yet slavery persists in many corners of the global economy. How do its beneficiaries justify it? Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick
Essay/History of Technology Web of war How the hair-trigger nuclear age and fears of Armageddon inspired visionary cold warriors to invent the internet Sharon Weinberger
Essay/Gender Who is a sportswoman? Elite female athletes are subjected to invasive gender tests, and hormone treatments if they fail. This is deeply unfair Silvia Camporesi
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Social Psychology The seductive lie of ‘Patient Zero’ and the outbreak narrative Leyla Mei
Essay/History The Masada mystery Have archaeologists proven the ancient tale of mass suicide in the Judaean desert or twisted science for political end? Eric H Cline
volume_up play_arrow pause Idea/Cognition & Intelligence On shared false memories: what lies behind the Mandela effect Caitlin Aamodt
Essay/Neuroscience Living in the now She can paint, but not name a painting; learn new music without knowing a tune. Lonni Sue is teaching us much about memory. Michael D Lemonick
Essay/Medicine Nobody is normal Are you average? Typical? Ideal? Adequate? The idea of ‘normal’ is a historical construct and it's time we got rid of it Jonathan Sholl