The Transience of Human 'Truth'

A clip from a Pursuit of Wonder video illustrates how man's ideas of what is true often turns out to be completely false.

In Peru in the middle of ...

False Assumptions About Others

Author Todd Rose makes the point that our tendency to make false assumptions, or fall into collective illusions, can result in mistrust, discouragement, ...

The Power of Preference to Shape Beliefs

Writer/historian John Dickson writes about a social media post that annoyed his atheist friends. It was a portion of a 1929 interview of Albert Einstein ...

You're Not as Virtuous as You Think

A 1961 research project asked ordinary people to send extremely painful electric shocks to a stranger. (Unbeknownst to the participants, the fake shocks ...

The Potent Poison of Pride

According to the National Geographic website (their kids' version that is) the Pufferfish can inflate into a ball shape to evade predators. Also known ...

Believing We Drive Better Than We Do

Who's a good driver? Everyone is, if you ask them. That's the finding of an American Automobile Association survey published February 2017 that found ...

Scientist Claimed the Internet Would Be a Fad

In 1995, an American scientist named Clifford Stoll boldly predicted that the Internet would be just another passing fad. He wrote an article for Newsweek ...

Our Overreliance on Experts' Predictions

In his book Future Babble, journalist Dan Gardner explores our obsession with "experts" who claim to predict future events. Gardner relies on the work ...

Research Shows We Inflate Our Good Qualities

Here's some good news: if you're like most people, you're way above average—at almost everything. Psychologists call this the state of "illusory ...

Eyes of a Doctor, Eyes of a Judge

Let's suppose that on your way to work each morning, you usually stop at a Starbucks. You tend to get to the store at the same time each morning, and ...