People often talk about how women are attracted to "bad guys" and don't actually like the "nice guys," or they ask, "Why do girls like bad boys?" or "Why do girls like mean guys?" In my opinion, these views are based on misunderstandings of what is attractive. It's definitely true that some women are attracted to traits like narcissism, callousness, and manipulativeness (and some unusual women...

Some remarkable things I suspect are true of nearly all adults:  1) We each hold some beliefs that are almost totally non-responsive to evidence involving some combination of our identity (who we are), our group, the nature of reality (e.g., God), or the nature of what’s good. Examples: • Many have an unshakable belief that they are good even as they harm the world (or believe they’re in...

When extremely angry, or extremely wronged, or when one has undergone incredible suffering, or when filled with belief in one's righteous mission, it becomes very tempting for many people to ignore very strong moral norms. But that's also how so many others in the past made grave moral errors. Right now, it seems important to make an assertion that is so obvious that one shouldn’t h...

Gaslighting, where someone causes another person to doubt their sanity or senses, can cause psychological damage. There's an opposite thing, though, that can also be damaging. As far as I know, it has no name. I call it "lightgassing" (or "light gassing"). Here, I explain how lightgassing works. Lightgassing is when one person agrees with or validates another person's false beliefs or m...

A lot of times, when people are upset, they want their friends and loved ones to "validate their feelings." I think there is a lot of confusion about what it really means to "validate feelings," and I also believe there are both healthy and unhealthy forms of doing this validation.  Healthy vs. Unhealthy Emotional Validation  I would say that the main difference between the health...

I have a few rules that I aim to use when I run studies. By considering what it looks like when these rules are inverted, they also may help guide you in thinking about which studies are not reliable. (1) Don't use a net with big holes to catch a small fish That means you should use a large enough sample size (e.g., number of study participants) to reliably detect whatever effects you'r...

Did you know that fairly often, there will be multiple extremely different stories you can tell about identical data, none of which are false? In other words, the mapping from statistical results to true stories about those results is not unique. This leads to a lot of confusion, and it also implies that claims about "the reason" behind a complex social phenomenon should be interpreted with ca...

A major mistake scientists sometimes make in public communication: they state things science isn't sure about as confidently as things it is sure about.   This confuses the public and undermines trust in science and scientists.   Some interesting examples:   1) As COVID-19 spread early in the pandemic, epidemiologists confidently stated many true things about it that were scientifically measured (...

I've come to think that you can somewhat reduce your chance of chronic injury (and improve chronic pain you already have) by learning to notice and pay close attention to pain right at the moments when it crops up. By doing so, you can learn to immediately adjust how you move to take the pain into account (not avoiding the action, but changing the way you engage in the action). The goal is to ...

Good things often get taken too far. They can take on a life of their own through self-perpetuation, get over-zealously applied, or become hijacked. This often turns good things into mixed things and sometimes even corrupts them into bad things. Here are four interesting examples: (1) Zoning laws in the U.S. helped solve problems (like keeping pollution-spewing factories away ...