Social Psychology at Work

Phil Zimbardo, renowned social psychologist, on The Colbert Report. Is Colbert a conservative evangelical?  I just have to ask.  I don’t have cable.

Fruit Flies

I’ve had a request! My first one, I think! So today I’m going to write about fruit flies.
A really long time ago I was a biology major. I’ve tried to think about why, and I think it’s probably because I really liked my math and science teachers in high school, and I [...]

Analogies That Don’t Work

In my last post I compared hesitance to tell others about a relationship to hesitance to tell others about a pregnancy until it’s in a certain stage. This doesn’t actually work as a comparison. First, a pregnancy lasts a finite amount of time. Once, shall we say, the seed has been planted, [...]

Enough…

…of dating for a while, I think.
This time I’m not going to make any stupid resolutions about what I am and am not going to do, because they’re all arbitrary, and no one thinks they’re necessary except me, and I always fail at them and then feel bad about breaking the arbitrary, unnecessary rules I’ve [...]

Love: A Thought and a Theory

From Ali Hill:

From Caryl Rusbult (who developed an “investment model of interpersonal relationships”; portion of slide from my Social Psychology class):

I’m tired of getting to work at 7.  Or even 7:30.  I think it’s time to shift my schedule back, come in and stay later.  I think I’ll be happier if I do.  Good news: [...]

My, My

This week really wore me out, one thing after another. Tuesday I did the whole caucus thing, not so much because I’m feeling particularly political, but because I wanted to see what it was all about. I think this year’s caucus isn’t representative because so, so many people showed up. It wasn’t [...]

So I had correctly diagnosed myself in the beginning — infection in my mouth, probably from eating too much wheat last week (I can usually handle some, but if my immune system is hard at work already, it sometimes affects me drastically). So, sure enough. I get to my appointment and tell the [...]

I Get So Tired Sometimes

I get so tired sometimes of allopathic doctors, their staff, and managed care. I know it probably isn’t fair to roll them all into one hated category, and I know that I have a lot of friends who work in this field, and I don’t mean you guys at all. I mostly mean [...]

Advice from Charles Simic

In the New York Times Magazine today, there’s an interview with Charles Simic, our poet laureate.  I wish it had a little more depth to it, but I do particularly like the final two questions (or, rather, his answers to them).  Especially this one:
Deborah Solomon:  What advice would you give to people who are looking [...]

Smart Television

Season Three, Episode 1 of Six Feet Under, “Perfect Circles,” just blew my mind.  Wow.  As it begins, we don’t know if one of the characters (I won’t give it away) is dead or alive, and we’re taken through a variety of possible situations — he died, he lived, he never existed.  In one of [...]