Overview: Psychology

Even if we do feel an emotion, there are parts associated with it that we aren’t usually aware of.

the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction... Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes ... "The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its w…

How to make sense of Donald Trump’s election? Here are some articles which helped me. Maybe they’ll help you.

all of us, even highly intelligent people, are prone to irrationality. Across a wide range of scenarios, the experiments revealed, people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason... those with a high I.Q. were, if anything, more prone to the conjunction fallacy... rationality, unlike intelligence, can be improved through traini…

NPR... team of more than 20 reporters offering real-time assessments on a live transcript of the debate.... used a transcription service that provides closed captioning via its API and fed the transcript into a single Google Doc where staffers cleaned up the transcription as it came in... more than 50 people had access

when people are confronted with moral dilemmas, they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

All hail the Trump-o-Meter, a short post on Medium

repeating a lie, which is generally part of the debunking process, can reinforce it. ... confirmation bias leads people who want to believe something to believe it even more after they’ve been shown they’re wrong.

In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge... being in “search mode” on the Internet helps people feel smarter, despite their searches resulting in nothing due to filters blo…

as news outlets tailor their content to addictive platforms to pump up traffic, the distinction between consuming journalism and being wedded to “emails, constant notifications, and social media” is increasingly meaningless... if we are what and how we read, then our thinking will mirror the scattered and shallow tendencies of Web browsing.... …

the online disinhibition effec... anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time strip away the mores ... seeping from our smartphones into every aspect of our lives.... the approximately 5% of Internet users who self-identified as trolls scored extremely high in the dark tetrad of personality traits: narcissism, …

Barb's job is to convince us that this simple system of thought can account for the messiness of many of our personal and interpersonal relationships, regardless of gender, race, class, age, language, education... Type is intensely democratizing in its vision of the world, weird and wonderful in its commitment to flattening the material diffe…

47% of Clinton supporters and 31% of Trump supporters say they have zero close friends who support the opposing candidate... The most segregated groups (those with the highest responses of “no friends supporting the opponent”) were young and black people.. Fewer than half the country has even had a conversation with someone from the opposing side’…

Cognitive ease is the concept of which when you hear something repeatedly, your brain starts to form connections around it, thus making it easier for you to process later. And since we prefer things to be simple and easy, things that are easy to think about generally makes us feel happier... for newspapers it’s part of the problem that we all face…

"If you're too metrics-driven, you're only going to be focused on what moves a particular metric, and you will use any hack or any trick or any deceptive technique to get there.".. many of the worst dark patterns are pushed by businesses, not by designers

The majority of people reading this article on Medium probably haven’t felt the pains that Obama described, so they’re confused, like me, about the popularity of Trump... It takes more than graphs and psychological theory to explain this, but I’m going to try.

The permanent banning of uber-troll Milo Yiannopoulos from Twitter was probably long overdue. It's time for non-trolls to stop complaining and start defending civility in our social spaces, or simply decamp to build better ones.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

In 2007 I tangled with the UK’s Eurosceptic movement when it was nothing more than a lunatic fringe. Post-Brexit, Welcome to the New Normal.

what product designers do to your mind. They play your psychological vulnerabilities (consciously and unconsciously) against you in the race to grab your attention. I want to show you how they do it.... The “most empowering” menu is different than the menu that has the most choices... When we wake up in the morning and turn our phone over to see a…

Instead of trying to bludgeon online companies to conform to some opaque standard of objectivity, we need to shift towards more fruitful endeavors... none of the outlets mentioned by name... are particularly well known news institutions... the underlying bias might not be based on institutional outlook, but an internal pressure to cite sources wit…

The filter bubble... has evolved. Algorithms, network effects, and zero-cost publishing are enabling crackpot theories to go viral... impacting the decisions of policy makers and shaping public opinion, whether they are verified or not... Facebook's news feed ... tailored just to us ... to keep us interested and happy... drives engagement and mor…

Ironically, with the widening of (national) news choices that the Internet has spawned, we’re depending on fewer pipelines of news. It’s a narrowing of the filter funnel...t as troubling as the filter bubbles that used to occupy our concerns, but likely more potent. As those pipelines narrow, necessarily, the decision on what is news, and what is …

The potential – or, sadly more accurately, theoretical – political power of social media is to provide an important public forum in which those of diverse opinions can freely interact, rather than living in political enclaves inhabited only by those who reinforce what everyone already believes. The truth is that those entrenched political division…

sometimes people post disagreeable or disturbing content that does not violate Facebook's policies. This paper explores the potential of community-driven counter-speech to play a critical role in challenging and diminishing these type of posts on social media. Counter-speech is a common, crowd-sourced response to extremism or hateful content... F…

Berners-Lee suggested a simple rethink in how social networks and human nature work together could help curtail negative behaviour... "we have responsibility to think how to build systems that tend to produce constructive criticism and harmony as opposed to negativity and bullying."

Great explainer video - accompanying article here.

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? ... his support seems to cross demographic lines ... does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast o…

“In 40 years,” Morton added, “as many people will believe a bunch of Arabs knocked down the World Trade Center as will believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”

I spent a few minutes viewing the Twitter profiles of some of the people who've followed me recently and I was struck by how much of their TweetStreams were simply RTs of other people here in Brussels. Don't they have anything original to say?