Posts tagged as:

psychology

Ten statisticians every psychologist should know

November 11, 2009

Psychologist Daniel Wright has published a list of ten statisticians every psychologist should know. The list is comprised of The Founding Fathers: 1. Karl Pearson - who established statistics as an academic discipline 2. Ronald Fisher - who developed much of statistics' mathematical foundation, including ANOVA and maximum likelihood, and the importance of p-values 3. [...]

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The pundit's credo

July 28, 2009

A new study shows that humans would rather our advisors be confident than actually correct: The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, [...]

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Voters may prefer candidates with similar facial features

April 28, 2009

There has been extensive psychological research into the fact that people are more receptive to others who are perceived as being similar. A new study from Stanford by Jeremy Bailenson, Shanto Iyengar, Nick Yee and Nathan Collins has applied this finding to the political sphere (pdf link). The research, published with the telling title "Facial [...]

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So you're telling me there's a chance?

January 10, 2009

Reader's Digest has written a brief piece looking at state lottery games and noting that an increased proportion of recession spending is allocated toward these games of chance. Lotteries are excellent laboratories for testing the theories of Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel prize in economics in 2002.  Kahneman's focus was on the cognitive errors that people [...]

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