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Freshman Funk: Is Harmful Thinking Contagious?
I know very few people who would describe first semester, freshman year of college, as a time of unqualified joy. I was certainly ready to leave home, but even so it was a disruptive time. I was disconnected from my family and close friends for the first time and, even more difficult, thrown into a dormitory full of strangers—young men from unfamiliar places with diverse experiences and values. This social disruption was not an altogether bad thing in the long run. I knew nothing about anything when I arrived on campus, and these new classmates, including my roommate, opened my mind to all sorts of ideas I might not have encountered otherwise. The intellectual life was contagious.
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Into The Hole: Terror And Survival
I know an artist who has a special interest in holes. He laboriously sculpts geometric holes in the earth, and then recreates them elsewhere. I recently saw, in a Chicago gallery, a hole he had sculpted in California, surrounded by outsize photographs of other similar holes. The overall effect was seductive and mysterious. Not everyone finds holes seductive and mysterious. Indeed, some people find holes—and images of holes—deeply upsetting, even terrifying. These people suffer from a common but little known phobia known as trypophobia. Phobias are by definition irrational and excessive, and indeed trypophobia sufferers recognize that their fear is unreasonable.
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Summoning the Past: Why This and Not That?
My memory baffles me. There is no rhyme or reason to what I recall and what I forget, whether it’s today’s to-do list or recollections of childhood. Important information vanishes, yet I have a random collection of odd facts and memory traces taking up space in my mind. I'm not alone in this. Everyone I know has a story about the quirkiness of memory, and scientists have been fascinated and perplexed by these oddities for years. Why isn’t memory a better system, more efficient and organized, if remembering is so crucial to daily functioning and future planning? Why do we remember so many trivial and irrelevant things? Why this and not that?
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Predicting Sexual Crime: Are the Experts Biased?
Leroy Hendricks had a long history of sexually molesting children, including his own stepdaughter and stepson. When he was 21, he was convicted of exposing himself to two girls, and he continued to prey on kids until he was sent to prison at age 50 for molesting two 13-year-old boys. He served ten years of his 5- to 20-year term, with time off for good behavior, and then was set free. Except that the state of Kansas did not want him to be free. Under its Sexual Violent Predator Act, and based on expert mental health evaluation, the state decided that Hendricks remained a public menace and a threat to public safety.
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What a Mess: Chaos and Creativity
One of the most influential ideas about crime prevention to come out in recent years is something called the “broken windows theory.” According to this theory, small acts of deviance—littering, graffiti, broken windows—will, if ignored, escalate into more serious crime. In practice, this theory leads to zero tolerance of public disorder and petty crime. Both theory and practice have been embraced by some big city mayors, most notably Rudy Giuliani, who credited the strategy with significantly cutting serious crime in 1990s New York City. The idea has been controversial from the start, for many reasons, but it does get some empirical support from psychological science.
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Feeling anxious? Think again.
Americans' number one fear is public speaking, hands down. Pollsters have reported time and again that the average person dreads speaking more than disease or even death. These polls merely confirm what our sweaty palms and elevated heart beat make undeniable: Standing up and addressing an audience brings out our worst misgivings about performance and failure and the judgment of others. We all experience some measure of social anxiety, but some people suffer much more than others, and not just with public speaking. Dates, job interviews, even idle cocktail chatter—any kind of social encounter can be a source of unbearable dread for people with a social anxiety disorder, or SAD.
