The New Yorker: In 1906, Hugo Münsterberg, the chair of the psychology laboratory at Harvard University and the president of the American Psychological Association, wrote in the Times Magazine about a case of false confession. A woman had been found dead in Chicago, garroted with a copper wire and left More
Aeon: In 1992, Juan Rivera was arrested for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Waukegan, Illinois. On the night of the murder, Rivera was wearing an electronic ankle bracelet in connection with unrelated burglary charges, and this bracelet showed he’d been at home. Yet, based on a More
Scientific American: Twenty years ago Rwanda was torn apart by violence. The Hutu majority slaughtered their Tutsi neighbors, killing approximately 70% of the Tutsi minority in the space of only four months. Once the killing finally stopped, a difficult question arose: how to right these monstrous wrongs without creating a More
NPR Science Friday: We’ve heard that human violence is on the rise, that it’s on the wane, that it’s hard-wired, and that it’s learned. But what do we really know about where violence comes from and how to stop it? Psychologist Steven Pinker, anthropologist Richard Wrangham, and crime writer Harold More
Fifty years ago today, a young woman was killed walking home from work in a quiet neighborhood of Queens, New York. Over the span of an excruciating half hour, she cried out for help as her killer maimed and stabbed her. And though there were people around who heard her More
Pacific Standard: The linguistic distinction between guilt and shame is often blurred. Some of the definitions that Merriam-Webster offers are nearly identical. Guilt is “a bad feeling caused by knowing or thinking that you have done something bad or wrong,” while shame is “a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt More
