Imperfect Cognitions

In this post I am pleased to interview Beatrice de Gelder (pictured above), Professor of Social and Affective Neuroscience at Maastricht University in The Netherlands. Her main areas of expertise are visual and audio-visual affective processes related to the perception of faces and bodies as well as auditory affective signals. She has extensive experience in designing and executing behavioral, functional and anatomical imaging studies, both in healthy and diseased populations, and has participated in funded research involving populations from diverse cultural backgrounds. Her current research focuses on face and body recognition and, recently, the neuroscience of art. She is currently serving as Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Emotion Science and Associate Editor for Frontiers in Psychopathology. In 2012, she was awarded an advanced European Research Council (ERC) scientific grant for the study of cultural differences in emotional body expression. In addition to Maastricht Univers...

This post is by Miguel A. Vadillo  (pictured above), Lecturer in Decision Theory at King's College London. In this post he writes about cognitive biases, error management theory, and the reproducibility of research findings.  The human mind is the end product of hundreds of thousands of years of relentless natural selection. You would expect that such an exquisite piece of software should be capable of representing reality in an accurate and objective manner. Yet decades of research in cognitive science show that we fall prey to all sorts of cognitive biases and that we systematically distort the information we receive. Is this the best evolution can achieve? A moment’s thought reveals that the final goal of evolution is not to develop organisms with exceptionally accurate representations of the environment, but to design organisms good at surviving and reproducing. And survival is not necessarily about being rational, accurate, or precise. The target goal is actually t...

We humans have a well-established tendency to be overly optimistic about our future and to think that the risk of bad things happening to us is lower than is likely, while we think that the chance of good things happening to us is higher than is likely. Why is this case? What drives these positive illusions? There are two possible ways in which we can understand and try to answer these questions. We can either look at the causal mechanisms underlying unrealistic optimism, or we can ask why this feature has survived and spread through human populations. Evolutionary psychology aims to answer the second question, in essence claiming that we are unrealistically optimistic because this has had benefits in terms of survival and reproduction. So why should it be adaptive to have systematically skewed beliefs, which are frequently unwarranted and/or false?  Martie Haselton and Daniel Nettle have argued that unrealistic optimism is a form of error management, it helps us make...

Michel De Lara (below left) is a researcher concerned with the mathematical and economic aspects of risk. Jérôme Boutang (below right) is a communication professional with expertise in environmental threats such as air pollution and climate change. Together with the Paris School of Economics, they started a research project on risk perception which soon developed into the Biased Mind project. In this post they introduce their new book The Biased Mind , which is published in the Copernicus popular science collection of Springer. Why is it that the French eat snails but not slugs? What makes the number 7 so special? Will your recent marriage last? Why is it that Batman, Superman and Spiderman fearlessly defeat evil monsters, but are hopelessly shy when it comes to women? And why is it that we crave sugary and greasy food, even though we know it's not healthy? The answer to these questions is that our mind is like a smartphone, filled with adaptive software, whose different...

In this post I interview Helena Matute  (picture below), who is Professor of Psychology and director of the Experimental Psychology laboratory at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain. AJ: You are a leading expert on causal illusions. Could you explain what causal illusions and illusions of control are? HM: A causal illusion (or illusion of causality) occurs when people perceive a causal relationship between two events that are actually unrelated. The illusion of control is just a special type of causal illusion in which the potential cause is our own behavior. That is, a causal illusion is often called an illusion of control when people believe that their own behavior is the cause of the unrelated effect, or, in other words, when they believe that they have control over uncontrollable events in their environment. Illusions of causality and of control occur in most people, particularly under certain conditions. For example, when the potential cause and the potential e...