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Did the eyes really stare down bicycle crime in Newcastle?

May 16, 2013 – 9:33 am

This is the first fortnightly column I’ll be writing for The Conversation, a creative commons news and opinion website that launched today. The site has been set up by a number of UK universities and bodies such as the Wellcome Trust, Nuffield Foundation and HEFCE, following the successful model of the Australian version of the […]

Posted in Reasoning | Comments (4)

The ‘unnamed feeling’ named ASMR

May 13, 2013 – 2:03 pm

Here’s my BBC Future column from last week. It’s about the so-called Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, which didn’t have a name until 2010 and I’d never heard of until 2012. Now, I’m finding out that it is surprisingly common. The original is here. It’s a tightening at the back of the throat, or a tingling […]

Posted in Attention, Integrating | Comments (10)

Race perception isn’t automatic

April 29, 2013 – 11:27 am

Last week’s column for BBC Future describes a neat social psychology experiment from an unlikely source. Three evolutionary psychologists reasoned that that claims that we automatically categorise people by the ethnicity must be wrong. Here’s how they set out to prove it. The original column is here. For years, psychologists thought we instantly label each […]

Posted in Other People, Reasoning | Comments (11)

What does it take to spark prejudice?

April 16, 2013 – 1:53 pm

Short answer: surprisingly little. Continuing the theme of revisiting classic experiments in psychology, last week’s BBC Future column was on Tajfel’s Minimal Group Paradigm. The original is here. Next week we’re going to take this foundation and look at some evolutionary psychology of racism (hint: it won’t be what you’d expect). How easy is it […]

Posted in Other People | Comments (12)

Why money won’t buy you happiness

April 2, 2013 – 11:53 am

Here’s my column for BBC Future from last week. It was originally titled ‘Why money can’t buy you happiness‘, but I’ve just realised that it would be more appropriately titled if I used a “won’t” rather than a “can’t”. There’s a saying that people who think money can’t buy happiness don’t know where to shop. […]

Posted in Reasoning | Comments (18)

When your actions contradict your beliefs

March 18, 2013 – 11:54 am

Last week’s BBC Future column. The original is here. Classic research, digested! If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards. And if you find yourself acting out of line with your beliefs, change them. This sounds like motivational advice from one of the more cynical self-help books, or perhaps a Groucho Marx line (“Those […]

Posted in Reasoning | Comments (5)

The essence of intelligence is feedback

March 5, 2013 – 10:12 am

Here’s last week’s BBC Future column. The original is here, where it was called “Why our brains love feedback”. I  was inspired to write it by a meeting with artist Tim Lewis, which happened as part of a project I’m involved with : Furnace Park, which is seeing a piece of reclaimed land in an […]

Posted in Theory | Comments (8)

The Master and His Emissary

February 23, 2013 – 7:54 am

I’ve been struggling to understand Iain McGilchrist’s argument about the two hemispheres of the brain, as presented in his book “The Master and His Emissary” [1]. It’s an argument that takes you from neuroanatomy, through behavioural science to cultural studies [2]. The book is crammed with fascinating evidential trees, but I left it without a […]

Posted in Integrating, Theory | Comments (7)

BBC Column: Why cyclists enrage car drivers

February 18, 2013 – 1:58 pm

Here is my latest BBC Future column. The original is here. This one proved to be more than usually controversial, not least because of some poorly chosen phrasing from yours truly. This is an updated version which makes what I’m trying to say clearer. If you think that I hate cyclists, or my argument relies […]

Posted in Other People, Reasoning | Comments (68)

BBC Column: The psychology of the to-do list

February 5, 2013 – 2:30 pm

My latest column for BBC Future. The original is here. Your mind loves it when a plan comes together – the mere act of planning how to do something frees us from the burden of unfinished tasks. If your daily schedule and email inbox are anything like mine, you’re often left a state of paralysis […]

Posted in Reasoning | Comments (3)

BBC Column: Are we naturally good or bad?

January 23, 2013 – 9:48 am

My BBC Future column from last week. The original is here. I started out trying to write about research using economic games with apes and monkeys but I got so bogged down in the literature I switched to this neat experiment instead. Ed Yong is a better man than me and wrote a brilliant piece […]

Posted in Other People | Comments (14)

BBC Column: when you want what you don’t like

December 21, 2012 – 11:34 am

My BBC Future column from Tuesday. The original is here. It’s a Christmas theme folks, but hopefully I cover an interesting research area too: Berridge, Robinson and colleagues’ work on the wanting/liking distinction. As the holiday season approaches, Tom Stafford looks at festive overindulgence, and explains how our minds tell us we want something even […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

BBC Column: political genes

December 11, 2012 – 12:46 pm

Here’s my BBC Future column from last week. The original is here. The story here isn’t just about politics, although that’s an important example of capture by genetic reductionists. The real moral is about how the things that we measure are built into our brains by evolution: usually they aren’t written in directly, but as […]

Posted in Theory | Comments (11)

Where is your mind?

November 23, 2012 – 12:03 pm

My BBC Future column from a few days ago. The original is here. I’m donating the fee from this article to Wikipedia. Read the column and it should be obvious why. Perhaps you should too: donate.wikimedia.org.   We like to think our intelligence is self-made; it happens inside our heads, the product of our inner […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (12)

BBC Future Column: Why is it so hard to give good directions?

November 12, 2012 – 6:25 pm

My BBC Future column from last week. Original here. Psychologically speaking it is a tricky task, because our minds find it difficult to appreciate how the world looks to someone who doesn’t know it yet. We’ve all been there – the directions sounded so clear when we were told them. Every step of the journey […]

Posted in Other People | Comments (5)

BBC Future column: The Psychology Of Tetris

October 29, 2012 – 9:50 am

Last week’s BBC Future column. The original is here. There’s a more melancholy and personal version of this column I could have written called ‘I lost years of my life to Sid Meier’s ‘Civiliation’, but since the game is now out on iphone I didn’t have time to write it. How the secret to the […]

Posted in Attention | Comments (7)
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