Intelligence and Other Stereotypes: The Power of Mindset
Walter Mischel was nine years old when he started kindergarten. It wasn’t that his parents had been negligent in his schooling. It was just that the boy couldn’t speak English.
Literally Psyched
Conceived in literature, tested in psychology
The Big Lesson of a Little Prince: (Re)capture the Creativity of Childhood
My heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;So be it when I shall grow old,Or let me die!The Child is father of the Man;I could wish my days to beBound each to each by natural piety.~William Wordsworth, 1802 “Once upon a time, there was a little prince who lived on a planet that was barely larger than he, and who needed a friend.”* That’s how Antoine de Saint-Exupéry would have liked to begin his story of the Little Prince...
Our Storytelling Minds: Do We Ever Really Know What's Going on Inside?
W.J. was a veteran of World War II. He was gregarious, charming, and witty. He also happed to suffer from a debilitating form of epilepsy—so incapacitating that, in 1960, he elected to have a drastic form of brain surgery: his corpus collosum—the connecting fabric between the left and right hemispheres of the brain that allows the two halves to communicate—would be severed...
Why Are We So Afraid of Creativity?
Creativity: now there’s a word I thought I wouldn’t see under attack. Don’t we live in a society that thrives on the idea of innovation and creative thought?
Hamlet and the Power of Beliefs to Shape Reality
Writing at the close of the nineteenth century, William James, the father of modern psychology (and Henry’s brother), observed that, “Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the objects around us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own head.” We now know that it is, in fact, the larger part: perception is just as much about construal, belief, the interaction of environment and memory as it is about sensory inputs...
How a Book about the Future Inspired Me to Look into the Neural Underpinnings of the Past
I’m about to make an embarrassing (to science fiction fans) confession: until last week, I had never read Dune . I wasn’t even aware that I was supposed to have read Dune .
Remembering the Exception to the Rule: Of Mockingbirds and Morality
This year, To Kill a Mockingbird (the movie) turns 50 (the book itself celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2010). I actually didn’t see the movie until late in college, when I came across the tape while rummaging through a cardboard box of my parents’ old films on a snowy evening in Vermont...
Can You Keep a Secret? Maybe You Shouldn't, Even If You Can
People are horrible at keeping secrets. As in, really, really bad at it (no matter what anyone may tell you to the contrary). And you know what? We’re right to be.
What Do Polar Bears and Social Faux Pas Have in Common?
Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a psychological goldmine. If you can think it, chances are he wrote about it. But as far as I know, only once has his writing directly inspired psychological research—and it was his non-fiction at that...
The Psychology Behind Gift-Giving and Generosity
A few weeks ago psychologist Dan Ariely, inspired by the holiday frenzy, pondered the hows and whys of gift-giving. Reading his piece—an endorsement of a behavioral economics view that challenges the rational economic contention that gift-giving is a largely irrational dilemma—at once brought to mind the story that has to me (and, I suspect, to many others) always epitomized the spirit of gifts and generosity: O...
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