Pop Psych

Unpacking evolutionary psychology

Jesse Marczyk Ph.D.

The Beautiful People

The world seems less fair to the unattractive and poor

Making A Great Leader

To understand what makes a great leader, you need to first understand what followers are shopping around for.

Doesn't Bullying Make You Crazy?

A recent paper claimed that bullying causes psychosis, and that's probably wrong.

My Father Was A Gambling Man

As younger children play more games with in-game purchases available, debates have begun to arise over whether games with loot boxes should be banned from their hands.

Sinking Costs

Human irrationality is often more rational than it looks. You just need the right context

Predicting the Future With Faces

Seeing into the future to predict where romantic effort would be best invested may be more doable than previously envisioned.

What Can Chimps Teach Us about Strength?

Do chimps like strong males because of evolution or culture, and are those competing explanations?

Online Games, Harassment, and Sexism

Examining the reaction of men to male and female player voices in Halo 3

Practice, Hard Work, And Giving Up

When it is is good to give up

Untitled Creativity Post

Thinking about when creativity is liable to thrive and wither.

No Sexism In Scrabble

Explaining sex differences in more objective fields

Imagine If The Results Went The Other Way

If your reasoning is immune to evidence, you aren't doing science.

Diversity: A Follow-Up

A recent study failed to find a benefit of demographic diversity in business outcomes. Why might we have expected that?

Does Diversity Per Se Pay?

It's been found that diversity itself predicts business success. As it turns out, that finding was the result of some mistakes.

If You Got It, Think Hard About Flaunting It

To what extent does promiscuity drive attitudes towards homosexuality?

Not-So-Leaky Pipelines

Some people think the world of academia is biased against women when it comes to hiring. Turns out just the opposite is true

Understanding Sex in Advertising

Sex doesn't sell all types of products equally well, new research shows.

Divorced Dads and Their Daughters

A new study claims that the relationships between dads and daughters are important for shaping daughters' future sexual behavior. The evidence doesn't seem that clear to me.

Why Do So Many Humans Need Glasses?

When visual acuity begins to decay with old age, there isn't much of a mystery. When eyes fail to develop properly in young children, that's substantially stranger.

More About Dunning-Kruger

It is often joked that the worst performers are the most unaware at how bad they are, relative to others. The extent to which that is true depends heavily on the task at hand

Why Do We Roast the Ones We Love?

Why do are insults between friends cordial, but insults between stranger not?

To Meaningfully Talk About Gender

Words need agreed-upon meanings if you want them to do anything useful.

Unusual Names In Learning Research

If you want to know how much research tells you about the real world, you better understand how closely the two things resemble each other. In this case, not very much.

Income Inequality Itself Doesn't Make People Unhappy

Despite the focus on inequality as a driver of human unhappiness, the reverse seems to be true. Inequality is either related to increased satisfaction, or no relationship exists.

Semen Quality and the Menstrual Cycle

Biology is costly, and organisms only invest in it when the probability of returns is deemed high enough

Academic Perversion

Meeting standards and filling quotas does not necessarily mean anything useful is getting done. Incentive structures occasionally undermine real productivity.