Quilted Science

Smoking is bad for your health, and smoking during pregnancy is certainly bad for your baby, right? Then why does scientific data often seem to tell a different story? Read More

Playing "hard-to-get" is a common concept, believed to increase peoples attractiveness to others. One particular way of playing hard-to-get, is to leave the other guessing about whether or not they are interesting to us or not. An upcoming study in Psychological Science investigates this previously unstudied relation between uncertainty and romantic attraction... Read More

Collective intelligence attempts to explain how groups of people perform on a wide range of mental tasks. Once again the whole turns out to be more than just the sum of its parts... Read More

Besides leaked documents, wikileaks also provides public access to data sets, such as when during a 24 hour period starting 3AM Wednesday 25th, 2009, the web page released half a million US national text pager intercepts; all of which stemmed from the

"24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington".

Here's what a recent report in the journal psychological science makes of these text messages... Read More

Besides inner qualities, physical attractiveness is an important indicator by which we choose our romantic partners. But there are of course several physical attributes that might make a person attractive, and only few people score high on all of these attributes.

Suppose then you were to judge attractiveness from either only a person's face or only a person's body. Which source of information do people prefer? And how do our preferences depend on what we are looking for in a mate? Read More

Nobody likes selfish free riders, but a recent study shows that people are not too fond of those who unselfishly provide for others either... Read More

Facial muscles are important to the brain's processing of emotional-language. So effect does a neurotoxin like botox have on the barin's capacity to process emotion-related information? A recent study in journal psychological science takes a look... Read More

Charles Darwin wrote that "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge", and Bertrand Russel proclaimed that "In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." A classic study by Justin Kruger and David Dunning explains the social psychology behind these observations... Read More

I ususally write research reports, but I did promis a book review, when Eating Animals came out, so here's what I've got... Read More

A recent study looks at differences in functional brain responses to scenes of suffering. Vegetarians and Vegans show distinct differences to Omnivores... Read More

A new study links eye color to perceived dominance (in men). But there is more to it than initially meets the eye... Read More

People have all types of strategies for rejecting belief-challenging information, but these strategies don't work so well when information comes from scientific research...but then again, what authority does science really have in the domains in which we hold personal beliefs? Read More

Besides the obvious effects of eating fast food there are also effects from THINKING about fast food: Priming people with fast food related symbols causes impatience even for non-food related choices, such as reading, saving and choosing consumer products. Read More

Research shows that students who forgive themselves for procrastinating, manage to reduce subsequent procrastination on the same task. Read More