Scholarly Pieces
Lying is easy
Lying is easy. This statement is not just based on anecdotal evidence. Bond and DePaulo (2006), Vrij (2008) and others document that the ability of a listener to evaluate whether a statement is a lie is surprisingly poor. It is poor even for people wh…
What’s in a name?
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” Spoken by Juliet, Act 2 Scene 2, Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare Our social world heavily relies on social labels. Often, it is hard to know what someone has actually been doing or sayi…
Fact Polarization
Both casual observation and contemporary scholarship depict Democrats and Republicans in the United States as warring groups with clashing worldviews and mutual animosity (Iyengar and Westwood, 2015, Hetherington and Weiler, 2018). These differences extend to basic questions of fact. Partisans express sharply divided beliefs about economic conditions (B…
Correcting misunderstandings about CO2 emissions doesn’t help to fight climate change
How much CO2 does one generate to raise a cow, make a steak out of it, and deliver it to your favorite supermarket? Most likely, you don’t know, and you are not alone. People have little clue about the size of the emissions associated with the goods they consume. When th…
Is awareness enough to safeguard us from biased narratives?
Ever since the birth of human society, much of the information communicated is not just fact, but narrative – qualitative interpretations of objective facts or events (Shiller 2017; 2020). As people become increasingly concerned about the detrimental effects of biased narratives on modern society, such as polarization and echo chambers,…
Wanting to talk, and what to trade it off with
Before you read any further, please ask yourself how good you are, relative other people, in answering the following question: “Dendrophobia is the fear of what? A: Spiders, or B: Trees.” Next, please ask yourself how good you are, relative other people, in answering a variant of this question: “De…
Lioness hunt in Berlin
Life in southern Berlin took an unexpected turn on 20 July, 2023, thanks to the hunt for a lioness. Just outside of the city borders, the local police received notice of a smartphone video clip showing a large animal, possibly a lioness, half-hidden behind bushes on the edge of a forest. Two police officers sought o…