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Impossible Knowledge: Are You an Expert?
I grew up with a habitual overclaimer. He wildly exaggerated his expertise, at times claiming knowledge of things he couldn’t possibly know—people, events, ideas that simply do not exist. Being unfamiliar with overclaiming, I just called him a liar. I couldn’t have known the word overclaimer, nor the concept. The word didn’t exist, and is only used today in the world of psychological science. Even so, we’re all familiar with these people who feel the need to overestimate what they know about the world. What underlies such assertions of impossible knowledge?
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Storing Information In Other People’s Heads
NPR: To function effectively in the world, you need to acquire a whole lot of information. You need to know exactly which medicine is appropriate for each ailment. You need to know how to fix your car and your router and your irrigation system. You need to know the date of every major holiday and how it is observed. Right? Of course not. That would be crazy. We don't keep all the information we could possibly need in our own heads, just as we don't make all our own clothes and manufacture our own doorknobs. We rely on a division of labor.
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How Self-Promotion Can Backfire
TIME: There are social consequences to tooting your own horn too often. Tuesday in social faux pas news comes a paper showing that when we try to make people like us, we often come across as braggy and annoying. We often practice a little self-promotion when we’re trying to be impressive. Turns out, it doesn’t always come across the way we want it to. New research published in the journal Psychological Science shows that people frequently overestimate how much their self-promotion works in their favor and underestimate how much it achieves the opposite effect. Read the whole story: TIME
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Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Social Media and PTSD, Preventing Procrastination
BBC: Claudia Hammond investigates Body dysmorphic disorder and asks if social media can really cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She also talks to the psychologist who explains why describing events in terms of the number of days away they are, rather than years could help prevent people procrastinating. Listen to the whole story: BBC
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Folk Explanations of Behavior: A Specialized Use of a Domain-General Mechanism Robert P. Spunt and Ralph Adolphs Do people use similar or different cognitive processes when making sense of social and nonsocial events? Participants' brain activity was measured while they completed a task in which they answered attributional and factual yes/no questions about the content of social images (emotional expressions and intentional hand actions) and nonsocial images (weather- and season-related).
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No Longer Wanting to Die
The New York Times: In January 2012, two weeks after my discharge from a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, I made a plan to die. My week in an acute care unit that had me on a suicide watch had not diminished my pain. Back in New York, I stormed out of my therapist’s office and declared I wouldn’t return to the treatment I’d dutifully followed for three decades. Nothing was working, so what was the point? I fit the demographic profile of the American suicide — white, male and entering middle age with a history of depression. Suicide runs in families, research tells us, and it ran in mine. My father killed himself at age 49 in April 1990.
