Psychology

In 1968, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson walked into an elementary school in San Francisco with a devious plan. They told teachers they had developed a new test that could predict which students were “intellectual bloomers”-kids on the verge of rapid intellectual growth. They administered the test, then gave teachers a list of students who supposedly scored highest. These students, they said, would show remarkable gains in IQ over the coming year. ...

In 1924, engineers at the Hawthorne Works factory in Illinois had a simple question: “Does better lighting improve worker productivity?” They increased the lighting. Productivity went up. Success! Then they decreased the lighting. Productivity went up again. They tried different lighting levels-bright, dim, even back to the original. Productivity kept increasing. The lighting didn’t matter. What mattered was that workers knew they were being watched. This phenomenon-where people change their behavior simply because they’re being observed-became known as The Hawthorne Effect. ...

You look down at your hands. They’re gigantic-swollen to three times their normal size, fingers like sausages, impossibly huge. You look at the room around you. It’s shrinking. The walls are closing in. The ceiling is descending. Everything is becoming tiny while you expand to fill the space. Or wait-are you shrinking? The room is growing massive. The doorway has become a cathedral entrance. Your hands are doll-sized. You are small, impossibly small, while the world balloons around you. ...

On September 13, 1848, a three-foot-seven-inch iron rod weighing thirteen pounds shot through Phineas Gage’s skull at the speed of a cannonball. It entered below his left cheekbone, passed behind his left eye, tore through the front part of his brain, and exploded out through the top of his head, landing about 80 feet away, covered in blood and brain matter. Gage was packing explosives into a rock using a tamping iron when a spark ignited the powder charge prematurely. The rod became a projectile, and Gage became the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience. ...

In the late 1800s, in the remote logging camps of northern Maine, there was a group of French-Canadian lumberjacks who would obey any sudden command without conscious control. Startle them and shout “Jump!” and they’d jump. “Throw your axe!” and they’d hurl it, even if someone was in the way. “Hit yourself!” and they’d strike their own face. They had no choice. The response was involuntary, immediate, and uncontrollable. They couldn’t stop themselves, even when they knew the command was dangerous or humiliating. ...

A neurologist is examining a patient who suffered frontal lobe damage from a stroke. The doctor sets a pair of glasses on the table between them during the examination. The patient reaches out, picks up the glasses, and puts them on-over the pair of glasses he’s already wearing. The doctor, curious, places another pair of glasses on the table. The patient picks them up and puts them on. Now he’s wearing three pairs of glasses, stacked on top of each other. ...

I once spent three weeks building a custom CSS framework. It had exactly the features I wanted. Perfect naming conventions. Elegant utility classes. Beautiful documentation. I showed it to my team. They said, “Why not just use Tailwind?” My response? “Because mine is better.” Was it actually better? No. Objectively, Tailwind had: More features Better documentation Larger community More battle-testing Active maintenance But I couldn’t see that. All I could see was MY framework, MY design decisions, MY time invested. ...

“It takes 21 days to form a habit.” I’ve heard this approximately one million times. Self-help books. Productivity blogs. Motivational Instagram posts. Life coaches. So I tried it. Day 1-7: Woke up at 6 AM to code before work. Felt great! I’m building a habit! Day 8-14: Woke up at 6 AM most days. Missed a few. Still committed! Day 15-21: Made it to Day 21! The habit is formed, right? ...

I checked Twitter 47 times yesterday. Not because I needed information. Not because I was expecting something important. Just… checking. Pull down to refresh. Scan. Nothing interesting. Close app. Five minutes later: Open app. Pull down to refresh. Scan. Find one mildly interesting tweet. Read. Close app. Repeat. All day. I wasn’t looking for something specific. I was looking for the possibility of something interesting. And that’s exactly how Twitter (and every other addictive app) is designed to work. ...

My uncle is intelligent, educated, and successful. He runs a business, reads extensively, and can hold sophisticated conversations about history, economics, and technology. He also believes: COVID-19 was created in a lab as a bioweapon The 2020 election was stolen A global elite controls world events through secret organizations Vaccines contain tracking microchips Climate change is a hoax to implement global government When I try to discuss evidence, he responds with: ...