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Editor's Selections: Video Games and Arrogant Humans

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Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week.

  • A post by Bradley Voytek on Oscillatory Thoughtsabout an article by Mo Costandi in Natureabout a paper by Dan Simons and colleagues, about research methodology and video game studies. Voytek writes, "It amazes me how many meta peer-review papers are written that simply reiterate basic research and/or statistical methodologies."

  • "Humans are consistently and bafflingly overconfident. We consider ourselves more skilled, more in control, and less vulnerable to danger than we really are. You might expect evolution to have weeded out the brawl-starters and the X-Gamers from the gene pool and left our species with a firmer grasp of our own abilities," writes Elizabeth Preston at the Inkfish blog. So why are humans so arrogant anyway?

That's it for this week... Check back next week for more great psychology and neuroscience blogging!

Jason G. Goldman is a science journalist based in Los Angeles. He has written about animal behavior, wildlife biology, conservation, and ecology for Scientific American, Los Angeles magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the BBC, Conservation magazine, and elsewhere. He contributes to Scientific American's "60-Second Science" podcast, and is co-editor of Science Blogging: The Essential Guide (Yale University Press). He enjoys sharing his wildlife knowledge on television and on the radio, and often speaks to the public about wildlife and science communication.

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