CHRIS PALEY'S WEIRD MINDS

The Covid-19 pandemic forces us to make an unsavoury calculation that most of us perform without realising. What is a life worth: how...

Imagine that you’d agreed to take part in an experiment on factors affecting task performance. For the first half-hour, you put twelve...

The most powerful technique we have for predicting what other objects will do is the invention of minds. We endow those things with...

Giving money to charity makes us feel good. When we decide to give money, the same part of our brain is active which responds when we...

When we judge somebody, it’s not sufficient for us to know that they’ve caused harm; we also think it’s important to find out whether they...

The life not lived can be more vivid than the life we do live. What if I’d married Katie or Suzie instead of Charlotte? What if I’d...

We don’t have conscious access to our real decision-making processes. But we do have access to a model which is very good at explaining...

As a child, if not more recently, you’ll have seen the Ebbinghaus illusion. When a circle is surrounded by other, much smaller, circles...

It is common knowledge that we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, taste with our tongue and smell with our nose. But it isn’t true....

Without being paid, other people promote brands to us everyday. Our friends might wear T-shirts bearing a little man riding a horse. Our...

Sometimes our understanding of people is so flawed that our attempts to change what they do have the opposite effect. In Arizona, there is...

Being single is bad for you, and expecting to remain single is bad for the people around you. Apart from the unpleasant feeling of being...

The best psychologists are good at deceiving their subjects. If volunteers cotton on to what a study is really about, some of them say...

Most of us are fortunate enough to be surrounded by things we like. There has to be something wrong with the man who lives with pictures...

The rich have it all to lose; you'd expect them to follow the rules. But here's how they don't... The less well-off realise they have...

In the news today, as every day, you’ll find lying politicians, racist attacks, rapes, murders, environmental ruin, wars and nuclear...

One of the frustrating things about the internet is the clickbait. Those headlines that begin, 'Here's why...', 'This is how...', '12...

Mobile phone and app designers have noticed something that you probably spotted before you started school. In the day, the sky is blue....

People are surprising. It’s a good job: if we and others always behaved in the way we’d expect, there wouldn’t be any psychologists....

We come to the truth in many ways. We read books, think, listen to other people and experience things directly. Other people lie...