The New Yorker: On January 27, 2008, Penny Boudreau’s twelve-year-old daughter, Karissa, went missing in her hometown of Bridgewater, Canada. That afternoon, mother and daughter had had a fight in a grocery-store parking lot. They’d been having a “heart-to-heart” about “typical teen-age things,” Boudreau said. At 7:30 P.M., Boudreau, worried More
The New York Times: Is a job applicant lying to you? What about your boss, or an entrepreneur who is promising to double your investment? Most of us are bad at spotting a lie. At least consciously. New research, published last month in Psychological Science, suggests that we have good More
The Boston Globe: Can you spot a liar? No, but you can sense a liar. That’s the implication of new research from psychologists at the University of California Berkeley. After watching videos of suspects being interrogated about a mock crime, people couldn’t reliably discriminate guilt from innocence when explicitly asked More
ORF Austria: Haben Sie schon mal einen Profi-Pokerspieler im Moment des Turniergewinns gesehen? Bei uns Normalverbrauchern würde all die Anspannung sichtbar abfallen, und wir würden jubeln angesichts des Batzen Geldes, den man als Sieger einstreift. Doch im Gesicht der Pokerspieler passiert: nichts. Sie sind so darauf trainiert, ihre Emotionen zu More
Studies on human development have shown that even as infants, we have an approximate sense of numbers and amounts. How does this underlie our ability to perform complex calculations? Stanislas Dehaene explores this question through neuroscience. He has used brain imaging to study how the human mind processes numeracy, as More
BBC: We are better at identifying liars when we rely on initial responses rather than thinking about it, say psychologists. Generally we are poor at spotting liars – managing only slightly better than flipping a coin. But our success rate rises when we harness the unconscious mind, according to a More
