- What informational and cognitive constraints did Simon say make true optimisation impossible for real people?
Cognitive Bias and Judgment
Systematic errors in human reasoning and decision-making.
- How did the researchers measure whether breathing through one nostril affected cognitive performance?
- What did Dunning and Kruger find about how low-scoring test-takers rate their own performance?
- Why do top performers tend to underestimate how much better they did than others?
- What is the underlying mechanism that links competence to self-awareness of incompetence?
- What did Lawrence Sherman's study of preschoolers reveal about how spontaneous glee spreads through a group?
- Why was studying happiness in children considered less conventional than studying distress?
- How did Gier and Kreiner test whether a previous reader's highlighting affects a new reader's comprehension?
- Why does the eye get drawn to highlighted passages even when the highlighting is misplaced?
- What is framing, and why does it change whether people perceive an outcome as a gain or a loss?
- Into how few dimensions do voters compress their image of political candidates, and what are they?
- What is inattentional blindness, and what does the gorilla study demonstrate about it?
- How do subjects typically react when told they missed the gorilla in the video?
- What did Beck's patients actually report about their depression that contradicted psychoanalytic theory?
- How does cognitive therapy help patients identify and challenge distorted thinking?
- What made cognitive therapy easier to test in clinical trials than earlier psychotherapies?
- What did Oppenheimer's studies find about how readers judge needlessly complex writing?
- What was the deliberately ironic title of Oppenheimer's paper?
- How did Raymer and Smith use knot theory to classify the tangles that formed when they tumbled string in a box?
- How did string length and tumbling time affect the number and complexity of knots that formed?
- How does needing to urinate affect a person's risk tolerance and self-control?
- What is Structured Procrastination, and how does it turn avoidance into productivity?
- How does placing a deferrable task at the top of a to-do list help a procrastinator get more done?
- What does this ability reveal about how chimpanzees form whole-body representations of group members?
- How did the placebo-alcohol experiment at a Grenoble discotheque test whether confidence comes from chemistry or expectation?
- Why did participants who only believed they had drunk alcohol still rate themselves as more attractive and confident?
- What role did the sober assessors play in establishing that the self-ratings were inflated?
- What is the core methodological paradox in asking people to self-report how often they lie?
- How concentrated is lying among a small number of prolific liars, according to the study?
- What personality or cognitive traits predicted who rated meaningless statements as profound?
- What was Fritz Strack's original 1988 finding about holding a pen between your teeth and finding cartoons funnier?
- What happened when seventeen laboratories tried to replicate the pen-in-teeth facial feedback effect?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee honour Strack for reporting his own effect's failure to replicate?
- How did Pluchino's agent-based simulation assign talent and luck to individuals over a working lifetime?
- What did the simulation find about the relationship between talent and ultimate career success?
- How can depositors' mere belief that a bank will fail actually cause that failure?
- What is a centre-embedded clause, and why does it strain working memory?
- How did Eric Martínez's study test whether legal prose structure, rather than vocabulary, causes comprehension difficulty?
- Did the study find any evidence that lawyers deliberately write to obscure meaning?
- How does a teacher's own boredom spread to students in the classroom?
- What role did students' expectations play in how boring they found a lesson?
- What experiment did Milgram, Bickman, and Berkowitz run on a New York City pavement in the late 1960s?
- How did the size of the staring group affect how many passers-by stopped to look up?
- Why did this study of crowd behavior receive an Ig Nobel more than fifty years after it was conducted?
- How did Schenk's trial compare a placebo with a side-effect label against one without any side-effect information?
- Why did participants rate the placebo with listed side effects as more effective than the one without?
- What does this finding suggest about how pharmaceutical labeling itself can act as part of a drug's effect?
- How does self-monitoring burden non-native speakers when they perform in a second language?
- How did a modest dose of alcohol affect participants' second-language performance in the study?
- Why did the Ig Nobel committee frame this alcohol-and-language finding as a contribution to Peace?
- How did alcohol affect the navigational accuracy of fruit bats' echolocation in the study?
- How did Zajenkowski and Gignac test whether narcissists more readily accept flattering but false feedback?
- What did high-narcissism participants report feeling after being told they scored above average on an intelligence test?
- How does Generation Z's habituation to constant digital information flow shape the requirements for online tutoring agents?
- How does a deep reinforcement learning agent that adapts to a student's changing metacognitive level compare to a static classifier-based approach for teaching strategy-switching in intelligent tutoring systems?
- Why do static, classifier-based metacognitive interventions only benefit students who already know how to use the target strategy, while adaptive DRL-based interventions close the skills gap across the whole class?
- How much can spaced repetition improve retention compared to massed practice, and what does it mean that one hour of spaced review can rival four months of massed instruction?
- Why do spaced repetition (timing of review) and retrieval practice (active recall) act synergistically rather than independently to strengthen memory traces?
- How can large language models be used to classify whether a human tutor's praise response is effective or effort-based, rather than person-based?
- What role does explanatory (versus purely corrective) feedback play in promoting deeper cognitive processing during tutoring interactions?