Doelen en middelen tegen elkaar afwegen is niet zo simpel—we zien (en tonen) onszelf graag als principieel, maar ja, we willen ook onze doelen bereiken. Geen nood! Er bestaat een handig kneepje—de moralisatietruc. Mijn @apache.be stukje: buff.ly/C6rxWJl

“What makes a choice difficult?” This is the central question for Behavioural Economics, argues @aleximas.bsky.social, coauthor of “The Winner’s Curse” with Richard Thaler—an interdisciplinary search for the cognitive foundations for behavioural anomalies: buff.ly/HUit8K8

“The more challenging it is to figure out what’s true, the easier people will find it to lie to themselves.” @danwphilosophy.bsky.social in search of the true(!) reasons why so many are holding false beliefs (TL;DR: it’s not motivated cognition): buff.ly/Gn9Wc45

Principled behaviour—unconditionally obeying maxims without tradeoffs or compromise, even at personal cost—is puzzling. Singh & Hoffman explain it through •‘committed agents’ (it’s “right”), and •impersonators (strategic, to gain trustworthiness) osf.io/preprints/ps... HT @a-marie-sci.bsky.social

Culture manifestly evolves, but tempting as it is to repurpose Darwinian natural selection as a model, that would be mistaken, argues Liane Gabora—we don’t *inherit* culture, we *acquire* it: buff.ly/5sxpmha

Scientists have developed an artificial tongue that can identify flavours entirely in liquid environments. It identified four basic tastes—sweet, sour, salty and bitter—with 72.5%- 87.5% accuracy, and drinks like coffee and Coca-Cola with 96% accuracy: www.livescience.com/technology/w...

Moderation in persuasion! New research suggests that there is such a thing as too many compelling arguments. Presenting many arguments—even cogent ones—often yields no benefit or can even reduce one's persuasiveness: buff.ly/ByWYWwu

Do we *have* to lie? Bryan Caplan has his doubts. Not only is it perfectly (well almost) possible to avoid lying by keeping silent, changing the subject, or avoiding certain people. Life without lies would be a big improvement: buff.ly/tl5Uba8

Hegel’s elitism gets challenged—alongside *reason* as the force to lift humanity out of the dark ages into civilization, we must recognize *stupidity*. A good argument is made for elevating it above reason, even: buff.ly/kPkZnI3

Repeating the same ad over and over is “efficient” use of the budget. But is it effective? How effective would Dave Trott’s blogging be if he posted the same text over and over? (Coincidentally, that’s this week’s topic.) Then why do companies do it? buff.ly/w12RnEJ

Students are more likely to contest a grade if the grader has a female-sounding name than a similar grade provided by a male-sounding evaluator, research by @perisaygin.bsky.social et al suggests: buff.ly/g64Hepn

What if the end does not really justify the means? If your goals do not justify the action needed, you can still safeguard your conscience and deflect any criticism from opponents by playing the Moralization Gambit: buff.ly/VST8vMB

Economics is not about numbers or theoretical models—it is at play in many everyday decisions as context-dependent *principles*, not formulas, argues Ram Shivakumar: buff.ly/KIN9m2g

How appealing an explanation is, is only in part down to how well it actually *explains*, research by klopfenstein.bsky.social & @hugoreasoning.bsky.social suggests. Usefulness and surprisingness matter too, the latter especially explaining why poor explanations become popular: buff.ly/NaSAlaJ

Intuition and instinct are not the same. When instinct—a reflexive survival response—disguises itself as intuition—drawing from body cues, cognition, emotion and more—we can misread situations, and cause more harm than good: buff.ly/v33EpWF

People who are averse to antidepressants like Prozac are often drawn to St John’s wort—a “natural remedy.” But there are doubts over both its effectiveness and its safety, and because it is unregulated, dosing varies widely: buff.ly/igBZ6R0

Walter/Wendy Carlos is perhaps the best known artist making synthesizer arrangements of classical—mostly Bach—music. But let’s not forget Isao Tomita, who pushed the boundaries even further—as here in Debussy’s Des Pas sur la Neige (with bespoke video): youtu.be/Im_N8qD4Yws

If you’re not a dualist, memory, meaning and indeed consciousness are rooted in our anatomy. That is indeed what neurons reveal, @niko-kukushkin.bsky.social argues—whether in humans or in sea slugs. Can we humans really be the same as sea slugs—only more complex? buff.ly/a74Rwo6

Is there a tradeoff between what is intrinsically enjoyable, and what confers status? Not necessarily, this post by @stefanschubert.bsky.social suggests—many things are both. But that can have the unexpected consequence of increasing welfare inequality: buff.ly/DANq1nD

Can it be both morally right to speak the truth and *not* to speak the truth? Of course! Lying and truth-telling can both be the appropriate reaction to the question “do you think my bum looks big in this?” That’s the power of the Moralization Gambit: buff.ly/ly8rfFc

Study by Castillo suggests Uber surge pricing substantially benefits all riders regardless of income—complainers appear unaware they’d wait longer for less reliable trips, without. Some drivers lose out. buff.ly/LU6uu2Z TL;DR:🧵by @captgouda24 buff.ly/60RHaXh

Researchers find that—like Hercule Poirot forms a composite picture from five differing accounts of a day—they can extract valuable signals from the differing outputs of an AI fed with real-world data, and use them to give statistical models a head start: buff.ly/nAGyyR7

Een (kerst-)anekdote illustreert hoe het niet zozeer de regels zijn, volgens dewelke we handelen en oordelen over de handelingen van anderen, die onze ware aard tonen, maar de *uitzonderingen* die we erop maken. ICYMI, mijn @apache_be stukje: buff.ly/pTxD76a

Research by Sevincer & Stoet reveals a pluralistic illusion around gender equality in Germany—contrary to their own experiences people believe they and others perceive high inequality, and both women and men wrongly believe men generally oppose equality: bit.ly/3YVedC7

ADHD is not a new condition—could it have been an evolutionary adaptation? Some of the traits associated with it may have been widespread in to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, 50,000 years ago, suggesting it was advantageous to them: buff.ly/0SfwYmf

But for one bacteria that discovered how to produce abundant energy from water and sunlight alone—unleashing a new gas to Earth, oxygen, complex life might never have been possible. @drkazzie.bsky.social tells the fascinating story of the Great Oxidation Event: buff.ly/9wTESkI

If you often feel tired, the problem may not be the quantity of sleep you get, but the quality—and there are quite a few ways in which you may well be interfering with it. Check out this TED-ed video to see if you recognize any: youtu.be/nn42RC1zT_A

“What gets measured gets done”—true, but incomplete. Eventually *only* what gets measured gets done. And if what gets measured does not quite align with your actual goal, trouble looms. @add-hawk.bsky.social’s The Score cautions about gamifying everything: bit.ly/44SCGvy

Biases can be seen as errors that hamper cognition, or as functional tendencies that are necessary for cognition. Gigerenzer offers a perspective of this apparent contradiction, arguing biases are functional in large worlds with substantial uncertainty: buff.ly/701MdP9

Finding weighing up whether the end justifies the means for one of your endeavours (or to judge someone else’s action)? No worries—if you’re not too bothered with being consistent, there’s a quick way to a convincing answer: the Moralization Gambit. buff.ly/MowJEnK

is there a biological reproduction/longevity trade-off—ie do mothers die earlier the more offspring they’ve had? In animals this seems so, but in humans, genetics, environment and societal factors complicate matters. New historic research sheds light: buff.ly/0LEAkff

Ananas als topping voor een pizza? Voor sommigen prima, voor anderen een gruwel—een voorbeeld van de regels die onze keuzes en ons oordeel over anderen bepalen. Toch zijn het de uitzonderingen die we erop maken die ons kenmerken. Mijn @apache.be stukje: buff.ly/pTxD76a

Our propensity to anthropomorphize AI chatbots is nothing new—we seem to be wired to humanize animals, vegetables and objects based on the presence of one or more of three factors: eyes, movement and language: buff.ly/AV8Al1s

Always wanted to know what it’s *really* like to be on board the ISS—the home in space for a select bunch of humans for over 25 years? Tour the International Space Station in this fascinating new NASA walkthrough video: www.popsci.com/science/iss-...

How do ordinary people—in the Czech republic—see Philosophy? A couple of—Czech—philosophers conducted a survey: buff.ly/BuaYlMW via @dailynouseditor

If you’re anything like 99%+ of people, you suffer from awkwardness—initiating and sustaining a rewarding conversation at a social event is the one thing everyone believes they’re *worse* at than average. @mastroianni.bsky.social offers some really useful help: buff.ly/nfHw5jw

Give me the chemical definition of ‘organic’ any day—an undergraduate course in organic chemistry left its stamp. Unfortunately the term has been appropriated by other interests and is being misused accordingly, writes Josh Bloom: buff.ly/gRxeEY7

Paternalism determines the divisions among different behavioural science perspectives. @casssunstein—who arguably has a horse in this race 😎—juxtaposes •coercive paternalism (mandating) •libertarian paternalism (nudging) •antipaternalism (boosting) buff.ly/nZ2QU64

Humans play—and not just little humans. Play shapes the social brain, and is likely rooted deep in our human neurobiology, explains Cas Holman—and neuroscience research shows it helps construct and refine many of the higher regions of the social brain: buff.ly/5XTSsg5

Blogged: The Moralization Gambit Weighing up means and ends is really hard. We want to see ourselves (and come across!) as principled, but all too often it's the ends, rather than the means, that drive our judgment. No worries - there is a quick fix: buff.ly/tyrdEA5

Our personality influences how long we live, systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal data by McGeehan et al suggests: •Neuroticism → increased risk of premature death •Extraversion and Conscientiousness → reduced mortality risk buff.ly/id08Zvt

Folk wisdom urges us ‘not to scratch that itch—it will only make it worse’. But as so often, it is bad advice—@neuroquest reports on neuroscience research that concludes the opposite is true. Scratching an itch and holding an injury do provide relief: buff.ly/liDWNSu

The sound of underground When scientists put sound sensors into the ground, they couldn’t believe their ears. Life in the soil was thought to be silent, but it is anything but. Soil bioacoustics offers new ways to study life underground: buff.ly/VBePQCT

A Christmassy library anecdote illustrates how overruling late return penalty rules reveals a librarian’s kind nature. Other, less noble, exceptions to the rules we follow reflex our values too, though. ICYMI, last call for my post, Overruling rules: buff.ly/F5CkUtJ

Demanding perfection from algorithms is perhaps too much, but accuracy sounds a reasonable expectation. But what do we mean by that—always approximately right, or usually very close, but occasionally wide of the mark? Laypeople and experts differ: buff.ly/cSUJYI3

Are our beliefs the result of gullibility or of skepticism, or perhaps of Bayesian reasoning? None of them, argues Rob Kurzban. “We’re all thugs, just waiting for the chance to attack whoever or whatever gets painted with an accusation.” buff.ly/MaMTERr

Contrary to earlier findings that levels of intolerance toward ideologically dissimilar and threatening groups are generally higher among conservatives, research by Brandt et al suggests that liberals and conservatives are equally intolerant: buff.ly/AOCOx2u

‘What are you thinking about?’ ‘Nothing.’ Could be we don’t want to share our thoughts—but maybe that is exactly what we felt. Such mind blanking is genuine and puzzling, and challenges our understanding of consciousness, writes @thomasandrillon.bsky.social: buff.ly/37aSPDO

“I thought we were just friends!?” A sadly common instance of confusing friendliness and romantic interest—with a clear gender bias: male overestimation and female underestimation of the other party’s keenness. How does this bias emerge and evolve? buff.ly/Y0pFgXL

Longitudinal research by Leal et al suggests participation in collective action moralizes individuals’ attitudes by politicizing their identity and enraging them towards the (immoral) outgroup, which in turn predicts sustained movement participation: buff.ly/8ev5HiC