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• [article] How to boost your 'intelligence' (and what intelligence really is) — 11 Nov 2015
  <p>Intelligence tests are wildly <a href="https://btr.mt/analects/alert-iq-scores-meaningless">over-rated</a>. But tests of general mental ability can be very, very useful. For starters, they are the most consistent thing in terms of their ability to pred…
• [article] Why job interviews make it harder to get a job — 6 Nov 2015
  <p>Would it surprise you to learn job interviews aren’t actually that useful for employers? In fact, in their most common form, job interviews aren’t even necessarily required at all. Why? Well, they come with a number of limitations; they’re very challen…
• [article] Why we ignore the biggest part of who we are — 30 Oct 2015
  <p>Half of what I write here is irrelevant. Oh, it’s probably relevant to <em>you</em>, but you probably only represent roughly 30% of the world. The audience of this site is predominantly from societies dominated by so-called ‘Western’ culture. That mean…
• [article] You don't understand negative reinforcement — 28 Oct 2015
  <p>The Skinner Box. A terrifying name for a wild ride in the research into automatic behaviour.</p> <p>Let’s start at the beginning though. We’ve talked <a href="https://btr.mt/analects/classical-conditioning">before</a> about how when one thing predictab…
• [article] How the term 'role model' came into being — 23 Oct 2015
  <p>After watching children <a href="https://btr.mt/analects/bobo-doll-experiments">beat the crap out of a clown doll</a>, <a href="https://btr.mt/analects/reciprocal-determinism">Albert Bandura</a> was finally able to show people that we don’t just learn …
• [article] You're studying wrong; encoding specificity — 20 Oct 2015
  Memories are a fickle thing. They get distorted, or lost. But there is a simple trick to strengthen your memories, and it all comes down to how you try and recall.
• [article] What kind of (armchair) psychologist are you? — 9 Oct 2015
  Psychology is not really a unitary thing. There are many ways to approach questions of the mind. And many people fall into distinct camps. Here, we outline the seven major perspectives you can find yours.
• [article] How our memory is divided (and how to maximise it) — 2 Oct 2015
  <blockquote> <p>God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.</p> </blockquote> <p class="text-sm font-bold -mt-8 ml-10">J.M. Barrie</p> <p>Our long term memory might be unlimited in it’s storage capability. But we have to know how it sorts …
• [article] How always being right makes you dumber — 23 Sep 2015
  <p>It takes a particularly strong person to admit being wrong about something. Not just because it’s hard to admit you were wrong but because our brain literally fights against it.</p> <p>Thucydides once &lt;a rel=“nofollow noopener” target=“_blank“ class=“e…
• [article] How memory works, learned from a person with half a brain — 18 Sep 2015
  How half a brain helped us understand remembering, and a magic number that determines how much we can hold on to.
• [article] Your mind ain't telling you the whole truth — 16 Sep 2015
  <p>Very early in psychology’s history, Sigmund Freud was working hard to understand the unconscious mind, something we’ve <a href="https://btr.mt/analects/unconscious-processes">talked about before</a>. Almost as a throwaway (in that he talked about these…
• [article] Children strike back - Bobo doll experiments — 4 Sep 2015
  Kids are incredibly impressionable. Albert Bandura’s research on role models showed how that can go from helpful to scary pretty fast.
• [article] How to terrify an infant — 2 Sep 2015
  <p><a href="https://btr.mt/analects/nature-vs-nurture-doesnt-matter-lecture">Nature vs Nurture</a>. The ultimate psychological debate. For some reason, we’ve spent almost 100 years debating whether people are a product of the environment they are raised i…
• [article] The struggle to be good; early psychology — 28 Aug 2015
  <p>Sigmund Freud was an unusual dude. He had some wacky ideas. But he also had some very useful ones. Prior to Freud, not very many people took the study of the mind very seriously. One of his more useful conceptions was his 1923 ‘Structural Model’, essen…
• [article] The 'inkblot test' ain't worth your time — 25 Aug 2015
  <p>Psychologists aren’t allowed to tell you about certain things. Especially certain kinds of tests. Why? Well, it’ll ruin them for you. They won’t be ‘valid’ anymore and if you ever need or want testing, they’ll be rendered less valuable. However, there …