Of all the David Frosts, I am the David Frostiest.
Leah Price has written a piece in the Boston Globe about how some doctors in Britain are prescribing books for their mental health patients. The National Health Service set up a program called Books on Prescription, which is just the latest example of a new wave of “bibliotherapy.” The School of Life, founded by Alain de Botton and …
Crews and Adler believe that most cases of the yips probably have a psychological basis of some kind, but that in some percentage the ultimate cause will turn out to be neurological.[The New Yorker] All philosophers of mind and most philosophers generally will recognize the error in this sentence, or should recognize it. Basically, the …
What do “affluenza” and Bat Kid have to do with each other? My essay on the moral psychology of empathy is here. I wrote: The New York Times’ “Room For Debate” feature has brought “affluenza” back into the conversation. Remember? A Texas judge gave a lenient sentence to a wealthy 16-year old, Ethan Couch, who …
The Boston Review critiques Richard Thaler’s latest book, “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.” Or actually the critique is of behavioral economics itself. Before behavioral economics, there was classical economics which, “assumes people are rational, utility-maximizing decision-makers with consistent preferences, correct expectations, and unbiased beliefs; in economic parlance, everyone is homo economicus, ‘economic human.’” John McMahon, …
Folks at Vox (“Rich People are Jerks, Explained“) have written up two domains of scientific research about wealthy Americans. One area of research shows that the preferences of the wealthy are more influential on politics, actual governance and policy than the preferences of non-wealthy people. Here’s a link to the main academic paper Vox used as a …
BishopBlog writes: In 2013, Tom Insel, Director of the US funding agency, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), created a stir with a blogpost in which he criticised the DSM5 and laid out the vision of a new Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project. This aimed “to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and …
Some in the blogosphere are wondering about the evolutionary origin of shyness. Why are some people shy and others not? Is there an evolutionary benefit? Maybe it’s a “spandrel” (that is, a by-product of another fitness-making trait). One study I read somewhere said that shy people as kids have over-active pre-frontal cortexes, which caused them …
Here’s what I wrote about that kid with so-called “Affluenza” and “Bat Kid” (remember him?) earlier this year.