Well, that escalated quickly. Or rather, slowly. Because when democracies start to fray, the corrosion is usually incremental: few regimes are overthrown overnight. The first few inflammatory statements are dismissed as innocuous, even as idiotic. But gradually, norms are shifted, tribes moulded, and scapegoats identified. Out-group hostility is the fulcrum […]
Tag: psychology
Psychology’s exaggeration crisis
From the Archives [A while back, I wrote this piece about academic exaggeration for The Psychologist magazine. See what you make of it…] Not another article about the crisis in psychology, you might complain. Déjà vu all over again? You thought we reached peak crisis some time ago, didn’t you? […]
No More Mr NICE Guy…
The newly released draft NICE guidelines for the management of “myalgic encephalomyelitis (or encephalopathy)/chronic fatigue syndrome” continue to cause a stir. And rightly so. The new guidelines not only repudiate a heretofore favoured treatment approach for a particular illness, they also threaten to discredit an entire (albeit quirky) branch of […]
Make Nostalgia Great Again
Here is a blast from the not-so-distant past: the Republican president speaks the day after the Democrats win a bitterly contested presidential election. Take it away, George W.: No matter how they cast their ballots, all Americans can be proud of the history that was made yesterday across the country. […]
You’re so vain, you probably think this global pandemic is about you
[A version of this article appeared in the Irish Examiner on 22 October 2020 ] The challenges of COVID-19 have been well reported. Death, disease, and debilitation are the scariest. Discombobulation also makes the list — nobody likes it when the entire world (more or less) gets turned upside-down. And […]
COVID conspiracies and the psychology of vaccine hesitancy
There’s a lot of talk about a vaccine for COVID-19. However, vaccines only work if people take them, and for that we require people to think cogently and coherently about the coronavirus. But if that were actually happening, there might not actually be a pandemic in the first place. Take […]