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Spoiler Alert! The Psychology Of Surprise Endings
Writers and filmmakers hoping to hoodwink their fans with plot twists have long known what cognitive scientists know: All of us have blind spots in the way we assess the world. We get distracted. We forget how we know things. We see patterns that aren't there. Because these blind spots are wired into the brain, they act in ways that are predictable ... In recent years, some scientists have begun to ask, can stories serve as a kind of brain scan? If a plot twist works by exploiting our biases and mental shortcuts, can observing the mechanics of a good story reveal something important about the contours of the mind?
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Creatures Of Habit: How Habits Shape Who We Are — And Who We Become
At the beginning of the year, many of us make resolutions for the months to come. We vow to work out more, procrastinate less, or save more money. Though some people stick with these aspirations, many of us fall short. How do we actually develop good habits and maintain them? What about breaking bad ones? Wendy Wood, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, has some insight on this. She's been trying to understand how habits work for the past 30 years. According to Wendy, habits are mental associations.
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How to Keep New Year’s Resolutions
Do you want to eat better, exercise more, stop vaping or lose weight?Great. Now's the time to set those New Year's resolutions.As we head into a year -- and a new decade -- your first step is to believe you can do it. The opposite is also true, said University of Scranton psychology professor John C. Norcross, who has studied resolutions for decades. If you think you can't do it, you'll likely prove yourself right. While about 40% of Americans set resolutions around January 1, about 40% to 44% of them will be successful at six months, said Norcross, reporting his results from multiple studies with colleagues.
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Why the Old Look Down on the Young
Ever since the Greeks, people have been complaining that the next generation is a disappointment. Nowadays, it’s Boomers fighting with those aggravating, avocado-toast crunching, emoji-texting millennials. The feeling is seductive—but isn’t it really an illusion? After all, the old folks who are complaining were once on the receiving end of the same complaints themselves. In the 1960s, the Boomers’ parents denounced them as irresponsible hippies. Have people really been steadily deteriorating since ancient times? In a new paper in the journal Science Advances, John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California at Santa Barbara call this feeling the “kids these days” effect.
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Authoritarian Leaders Thrive on Fear. We Need to Help People Feel Safe
Like many of us, I have worried about the rising tide of rightwing populism, nationalism and polarisation across the world. Within just a few years, we’ve witnessed the election of Donald Trump in the US, the Brexit decision in the UK, the rise of Matteo Salvini in Italy, Victor Orbán in Hungary, the Freedom party in Austria and the Law and Justice party in Poland. The world’s largest democracy, India, is menaced by a newly virulent nationalism and xenophobia. For a long time I wondered what explained the appeal of these apparently fringe movements that, in my view, had accidentally gone mainstream.
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How to Think Clearly in Beleaguered Times
George Monbiot makes a telling link between individuals’ affective state and the unwitting support we lend to demagogues (Journal, 3 October). In their fascinating book The Boy who was Raised as a Dog, Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz develop this notion of state-dependent functioning and apply it to organisations. ... Monbiot rightly calls for us to restore the mental state that allows us to think. For each of us as individuals, what might this involve? In the language of Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, such a restoration entails moving from a state of dysregulation to one of regulation.
