Quirky Little Things

The science of the queer and the quotidian.

By Jesse Bering

"Bering in Mind" Has Gone Live

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on January 5, 2009 - 1:19pm in Quirky Little Things

This is just a quick note to say that I will be posting somewhat less frequently on PT Blogs. I know, I know, you're crying your eyes out. But before you do anything rash, rest assured I'm not going far away. The reason for the slow-down is that I've just signed a contract with Scientific American to author a regular column titled "Bering in Mind" and will need to juggle my extra writing time sensibly. Read More

Potato Chip Gods

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on December 8, 2008 - 4:07pm in Quirky Little Things

Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie's classic book Faces in the Clouds presents the fascinating thesis that religious thought is the accidental by-product of an evolved psychological system that's been designed to detect signs of other creatures in the natural environment. Read More

Religious People Aren't as Scientifically Naive as We Think

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on December 7, 2008 - 4:44am in Quirky Little Things

University of Michigan psychologist Susan Gelman and her colleagues have been exploring people’s causal reasoning about illness. These researchers have found that, at least when it comes to what goes on in our own heads, there’s not much of a conflict between religion and science. Read More

'Tis the Season: The Psychology Behind Christmas Cards

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on December 2, 2008 - 7:44am in Quirky Little Things

Stasis makes me antsy. As a consequence, I’ve cycled through a lot of different houses over the past few years. Rather strange houses. I’ve lived in everything from a tacky condominium in Boca Raton, a renovated bowling alley apartment in Fayetteville, a secluded log cabin in the middle of the Ozark Forest, an old terraced flat overlooking the Atlantic, to my present house, a somewhat bland townhouse with a view to the cemetery across the road, where the tombstones are so close I can tell you from my living room window the date Edward Sullivan died (Feb 18, 1932). Read More

Let's Talk About the Dead

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on November 19, 2008 - 12:37pm in Quirky Little Things

One of the more peculiar findings to emerge from my laboratory over the past few years is what I've termed the posthumous effect, the tendency to psychologically alter our perceptions of the recently dead in a favourable direction. Read More

Impostor!

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on November 17, 2008 - 9:26am in Quirky Little Things

I don't know what it says about me that as a thirteen-year-old boy my favourite television show was The Golden Girls, but like many fans I was saddened earlier this year to learn of the death of Estelle Getty, who played the sassy Sicilian octogenarian Sophia Petrillo in this long-lived series. Given her obvious talent and inimitable delivery on screen, you might be surprised that Estelle Getty felt like a fraud as an actress. Here's what she said in a 1988 interview with Entertainment Tonight: Read More

Know Thyself, to No Avail

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on November 3, 2008 - 6:37am in Quirky Little Things

Yesterday I participated in ‘The Battle of Ideas Festival' in London, where along with three other panelists I debated the impossibly broad question "Does evolution determine human behaviour?" As usual, I'd not prepared enough for the talk, and found myself muttering some nonsense on-stage that the audience graciously suffered. But here's what I should have said: Read More

Con Artists in the Crib

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on October 31, 2008 - 6:51am in Quirky Little Things

Evolutionary psychology isn't all about sex. It all extrapolates to reproductive success eventually, but in my opinion some of the most interesting proposed psychological adaptations are far removed from the textbook miscellany of waist-to-hip ratios, facial symmetries, mate retention, and sexual pageantry. Read More

No, Einstein Didn't Believe in the Afterlife....

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on October 29, 2008 - 1:41pm in Quirky Little Things

Recently I published an article in Scientific American Mind entitled "Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death." The article summarises a body of research -- both my own and the findings of other researchers --that has led me as a psychological scientist to believe that the afterlife is a bizarre illusion promulgated by the human mind. Read More

I Hope You're Reading This, Lady (But You're Probably Not)

By Jesse Bering, Ph.D. on October 25, 2008 - 12:53pm in Quirky Little Things

I'm the sort who'd typically come to the defense of mistreated employees whenever some crass, verbally abusive jackass of a customer starts giving them a hard time. The customer isn't always right. Problems inevitably arise, it's usually not the individual employee's fault, they're just doing their jobs. Having said that, yesterday at Stansted Airport my student Beth Heywood and I experienced an "interactional service failure" with a certain airline representative and if the world didn't frown upon such things, I'd have gladly inflicted catastrophic damage upon this woman. Read More