“Why Don't You Act Like You Believe It?”: Competing Visions of Climate Hypocrisy

Now You See It, Now You Dont: how social cues and questions misdirect our attention

Magic tricks offer powerful tools to manipulate people’s attention and conscious experience. Using realworld eyetracking we can investigate how different misdirection cues drive people’s eye movements. Moreover, by measuring people’s susceptibility to the trick, we can evaluate how these cues influence people’s conscious experience. We used a magic trick to explore the way in which spoken quest...

You can't not believe everything you read.

Can people comprehend assertions without believing them? Descartes (1644/1984) suggested that people can and should, whereas Spinoza (1677/1982) suggested that people should but cannot. Three experiments support the hypothesis that comprehension includes an initial belief in the information comprehended. Ss were exposed to false information about a criminal defendant (Experiments 1 and 2) or a ...

Can you believe what you read?

You gotta believe

I argue that proper assertion requires belief. Jennifer Lackey has recently argued otherwise. Here I respond to Lackey’s argument and provide positive evidence that permissible assertion does require belief. The positive evidence takes the form of an explanatory argument from linguistic patterns surrounding the give and take of assertion. Looming large in the background of the discussion is whe...

Teaching Random Assignment: Do You Believe It Works?

Textbook authors admonish students to check on the comparability of two randomly assigned groups by conducting statistical tests on pretest means to determine if randomization worked. A Monte Carlo study was conducted on a sample of n = 2 per group, where each participant's personality profile was represented by 7,500 randomly selected and assigned scores. Independent samples t tests were condu...