It is my belief that at the centre of our misunderstanding of success and creativity lays our ego.  In the deep dark depths of our psyche we allow mutual myth perpetuation and self-importance to cloud the truth about “talent”.  That is, that all those artists, designers and thinkers would have to admit that they did [...]

Just added a summary of this study on holah.co.uk It’s not the best summary ever written as it is difficult to do justice to such an influential 40 page experimental case study. I would like to delete a few bits to make it shorter and easier to read but would also like to add more [...]

Mind Changers is a recent series exploring the development of the science of psychology during the 20th century. More information available from the BBC Radio 4 website. Four excellent episodes for you to listen to. Enjoy. The Pseudo-Patient Study Claudia Hammond revisits David Rosenhan’s Pseudo-Patient Study The Hawthorne Effect The 1920s experiment in a Chicago [...]

With $55 million, a collection of frozen human brains and robots capable of processing 192 brain slices a day, the Allen Brain Institute is attempting to do the impossible: systematically map out the expression patterns of more than 20,000 genes that make our grey matter tick. The science behind the techniques isn’t new. Researchers have [...]

“… Rational choice theory predicts that people will not gamble, thus it is theorised that regular gamblers gamble because they make the wrong decisions – that cognitive bias (irrational thinking) distorts their reasoning. The aim of this study was to increase understanding of the cognitive processes and behaviour of persistent fruit machine gamblers.” Almost 18 [...]

We all like to think that we have good memories for events and that if we were to be witness to a crime or incident that we would be able to recall in detail the events of the day. However our memories are not that reliable at all.  This has implications on many levels, but [...]

There has been an almost widespread consensus amongst social psychologists that tyranny triumphs either because ordinary people blindly follow orders or else because they mindlessly conform to powerful roles. Much of this consensus has been influenced by the work of Milgram and Zimbardo However, more recently, British psychologists S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher [...]

This video clip is not taken from the original 1950s experiments but is in fact a ‘made for telly’ version, from I think (guessing at the fashion of the actors). the late 1970s. The acting isn’t bad though. Solomon Asch was interested to find out about conformity and in particular, the circumstances in which people [...]

There’s a nice little two part piece on The Situationist which has Zimbardo commenting on Milgram’s work. Well worth a read. “Milgram left us with a vital legacy of brilliant ideas that began with those centered on obedience to authority and extended into many new realms—urban psychology, the small-world problem, six degrees of separation, and [...]

We all know the power of role models and I have written about the effect of role modes on behaviour many times before: from the moving ‘Children See, Children Do‘ campaign to talking about the effectiveness of the pictures of death and destruction that now adorn our fag packets. All these ideas are supported by [...]