Blog/Podcast
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What Makes a Dad Joke Funny? Science Weighs In
I am known in my family for bad jokes. Dad jokes, mostly puns. I text them to relatives and what comes back, nearly every time, is the eye-roll emoji. One I told on this show years ago: Did you hear about the actor who fell through the trapdoor during a performance? It was just a…
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One Simple Habit for a Happier Marriage? Not So Fast
Picture a couple heading out the door after dinner for a walk around the block. Nothing dramatic, just twenty minutes, side by side, talking about the day. A new study says couples like that tend to have stronger marriages. It is the kind of finding that makes for a warm headline: one simple habit, a…
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I’m Not the Person I Used to Be (and Why Your Brain Wants You to Believe That)
Somebody you haven’t seen in years brings up a kind thing you once did for them. You shrug and say, “Well, of course. That’s what friends do.” Now imagine the same person brings up a time you let them down, or told them something that wasn’t true. This time the words that come out are…
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You’ve Got Dopamine Backwards (and I Can Prove It On Piano)
Picture yourself on the couch, phone in hand, scrolling through a food delivery app. You linger over the dumplings. You consider the spring rolls. You add the spring rolls. You place the order, and for the next forty minutes something in you is quietly humming. Then the bag arrives, the food is a little lukewarm,…
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Science Corrects Itself: The Embodied Cognition Story
Try giving someone directions while sitting on your hands. It is harder than it should be. Your hands start drawing the map, pointing at the turns, shaping the roundabout — even on the phone, where nobody can see a thing. The body gets involved in work that supposedly belongs to the brain, and for the…
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The Secret to a Good Joke Is Silence
You’ve had this happen: you tell a story you know is funny, you get to the good part, and … nothing. Somebody smiles politely. And you replay it later thinking the joke was fine, the wording was fine, so what went wrong? A group of researchers just spent 86 hours listening to professional stand-up comedians…
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Who’s Actually Choosing What You Watch Next?
You open the app to check one thing. Twenty minutes later you are still there, watching videos you never went looking for, and somehow you have “decided” to buy something you didn’t know existed when you picked up your phone. So whose decision was that, really? A new study by Zhean Zhu and Kai Wang…
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Mixed Feelings About AI: Cognitive Dissonance and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Why using AI tools leaves so many of us stuck in an uncomfortable middle — and what four psychologists can tell us about the way we manage that discomfort. There’s a feeling a lot of us get when we sit down to use an AI tool. You ask it for help, and a few seconds…
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Why the Whites of Your Eyes Shape a Stranger’s First Impression
You meet someone for the first time, and within a second or two you’ve already decided something about them — whether you’d trust them, whether you’d want to keep talking. You didn’t run through a checklist. It just happened. And it turns out one of the things your brain quietly picks up on is something…
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Why Nobody Pushed the Button: The Psychology Behind a Subway Tragedy
When someone collapses in a public place, will anyone actually help? It’s one of the oldest questions in social psychology, and the newest research gives a surprisingly hopeful answer. But a recent death in a Boston subway station complicates that answer in a way worth understanding — not because it proves people are heartless, but…
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AP Psych Terms
accommodation adversarial collaboration assimilation Attractiveness Automatic processing behaviorism Cognitive Dissonance Confounding variable Correlation and causation demand characteristics dopamine embodied cognition encoding Evolutionary psychology First Impressions Framing health psychology Heuristic history of psychology Humor humor research Lawrence Kohlberg Leon Festinger levels of processing little albert mere exposure effect Misattribution of arousal neurotransmitters Peripheral route persuasion pre-registration psychology of humor publication bias Randomized controlled trial Relationship satisfaction replication Selective Attention self-serving bias sensation seeking social cognition the experimenter expectancy effect