People will retain certain habits through changing circumstances. For example, if they once enjoyed sitting on their porch in the country, they may find themselves drawn to sitting on the steps by the sidewalk outside their low-income housing complex. The scenery has changed, but the behavior remains. Consistency in behavior tempers destabilization with an assuring…
The placebo effect demonstrates the mind’s capacity to outperform a given treatment. Within contextual limits, one can deduce from it the impact on the body of believing to be true something that is false. I’m interested here in a related concept that follows quite naturally: what is the impact of believing to be true something…
Until a dispute is resolved in favor of one of the participating parties, it might be supposed that once each party has articulated its argument and, in so doing, established the merit of its position relative to the positions of the other participants–as judged by the notorious Impartial Third Party–the arrangement of participants in order…
People without progeny have difficulty conceiving of what it would be like to have a child. This is wildly unexpected. It seems their prediction effort should yield something more veracious, more definitive than an ever-receding mirage of uncertainty, especially since the future they’re trying to imagine is, in many ways, simply a reciprocal of the…
It’s difficult to alter, without use of chemicals, patterns of behavior that chemical use cultivated–so difficult, in fact, that one of the most effective methods relies on the supposition that chemicals are involved. And in an important sense, the supposition is correct. The Placebo Effect, in many cases potent and sustainable, results from a deluge…
We postpone taking actions that facilitate our comfort in cases where immediately obliging the desire would result in others’ discomfort. This is polite behavior. For example, you won’t see a sober passenger take a piss on the subway. What’s happening implicitly in many of these cases, including the example above, is the establishment of a…
When we’re surrounded by what we want, we cease to want it. The trivial explanation is that the desire to have is incompatible with the condition of having. “Listen hear, little nipper! You can’t want to have what you already keep!” This is, however, a pathetic, semantics-fueled avoidance of the following truth: when one is…
Contrary to the law of midday meals, some things hardly need to be worked for in order to be earned. They can be earned, in other words, for a lesser price than it seems they are worth. In even other words, so as to balance the books of the linguistic expression economy, a part of…
People can be led to second-guess themselves when information presented to them differs slightly, in conceivable ways, from their expectations or beliefs. It’s straight-forward to state that the likelihood of second-guessing one’s self grows with the region of overlap between what one had held to be true and the new information.* And for anyone doubting…
People often perform tasks measurably better when the tools they’re using put them in a state of enthused confidence. You are right to consider this statement obvious, but obvious statements are no more immune to being run through the gamut and deconstructed into their atomic elements than are ambiguous ones. Moreover, it is the humor…