Mind, features and articles | Educational Science

Mar 31, 2018

Why It's So Hard to #DeleteFacebook

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Here we go again: another Facebook controversy, yet again violating our sense of privacy by letting others harvest our personal information. This flareup is a big one to be...

Apr 2, 2018

Meet 'Norman,' the Darkest, Most Disturbed AI the World Has Ever Seen

A neural network named Norman is disturbingly different from other types of artificial intelligence (AI). Housed at MIT Media Lab, a research laboratory that investigates AI and machine learning, Norman's computer brain was allegedly warped by exposure to the darkest corners of Reddit during its early training, leaving the AI...

Jun 15, 2018

One of Psychology's Most Famous Experiments Was Deeply Flawed

The Stanford Prison Experiment — the infamous 1971 exercise in which regular college students placed in a mock prison suddenly transformed into aggressive guards and hysterical prisoners — was deeply flawed, a new investigation reveals. The participants in the experiment, who were male college students, didn't just organically become abusive...

Jun 20, 2018

Separated Migrant Children Face Lasting Psychological Trauma

Doctors and researchers alike are warning that a great deal of psychological harm can occur when young children are separated from their parents and denied comforting hugs from caregivers. The outcry from pediatric experts comes after several weeks of the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy, which has resulted in the...

Aug 6, 2018

Angry People Think They’re Smarter Than They Are

If you know someone who's generally ill-tempered, it might please you to know that they're probably not as smart as they think they are. That's because, unlike other negative emotions, anger seems to make people overconfident about their intelligence, a new study suggests. Anger differs significantly from other negative emotions,...

Sep 14, 2018

People Don't Know When They're Being Jerks

How well do you know yourself? New research suggests that people are pretty good at knowing how they're acting, with one exception: whether they're being jerks. According to a study posted on the psychology preprint server PsyArXiv, people are relatively accurate judges, moment to moment, of whether they're acting outgoing...

Oct 2, 2018

This Test Can Measure the 'Dark Core' of Your Personality

Narcissists, psychopaths and sadists all have something in common: An underlying dark core of personality. Recent research suggests that so-called dark personality traits are all a manifestation of an underlying tendency to put oneself first at the expense of others. This underlying tendency, which researchers are calling the D-factor, can...

Oct 15, 2018

Your Memory Could Store Up to 10,000 Faces, or More

How many faces do you retain in your memory? If you add up your immediate and extended family, schoolmates, friends, co-workers, and celebrities that you know through movies, television and the internet, you might easily be able to list a few hundred faces that you'd recognize on sight. But the...

Oct 31, 2018

Dissecting the Bloodthirsty Bliss of Death Metal

Brutality now becomes my appetite Violence is now a way of life The sledge my tool to torture As it pounds down on your forehead Shakespeare it's not. Those lyrics, from Hammer Smashed Face by the band Cannibal Corpse, are typical of death metal — a subgenre of heavy metal...

May 19, 2019

How Accurate Is the Myers-Briggs Personality Test?

There are two types of people in the world: those who believe in the Myers-Briggs personality test and those who don't. Except that's not true. Grouping people into two, three or 16 categories, which is the aim of a lot of personality tests, has never quite worked. And even in...

Jul 5, 2019

Men Notice Messes As Much As Women. Here's Why They Don't Clean Up.

On a typical day, men spend a third as much time cleaning as women. Does that make women beacons of cleanliness, while men are genetically unable to see the messiness in their midst? This myth is a common explanation for why men don't do as much housework as women. Men...

Sep 26, 2019

Wealthy Couple Gives UCLA $20 Million to Find the 'Antidote' to an Unkind World

It manifests in small gestures like giving up your seat on the subway, as well as large acts like volunteering your time to rebuild homes and feed the hungry in the wake of disaster. Scholars at the University of California, Los Angeles, are pooling their efforts to study an elusive...

Nov 19, 2019

Does Adversity Really Make Us Stronger?

In our culture, there's this idea that enduring a tragedy can be good for your personal growth. You'll have a newfound appreciation for life. You'll be grateful for your friends and family. You'll learn from the experience. You'll become more resilient. This theme appears in media coverage, time and again,...

Dec 13, 2019

The Science Behind Your (Irrational) Fear of Friday the 13th

Today is the second (and last) Friday the 13th of the year. Even though the date is known throughout Western culture as one tainted with evil and negativity, it's really just another Friday on the calendar. There is no difference between today and yesterday, or last Friday, regarding luck. Right?...

Dec 15, 2019

Why Do People Have Different Personalities?

Everyone has certain likes, dislikes, quirks and idiosyncrasies — all the qualities that make up your personality, the things that make you you. That everyone has unique personalities makes life more interesting (or, sometimes, more difficult). But where do personalities come from, and why are they so different? Over the...