Although humans strive to be wise, they often fail to do so when reasoning over issues that have profound personal implications. Here we test the hypothesis that psychological distance enhances wise reasoning, attitudes and behavior under such circumstances. Two experiments demonstrate that cueing people...

By Emily B. Falk, Elliot T. Berkman, Traci Mann, Brittany Harrison, and Matthew D. Lieberman "Although persuasive messages often alter people's self-reported attitudes and intentions to perform behaviors, these self-reports do not necessarily predict behavior change. We demonstrate that neural...

We all know the story in which science supposedly demonstrates a Bumblebee only flies because it doesn’t know it can’t. I know the real story but like that one better because the bumblebee still goes about its daily tasks, unencumbered by knowing about all the impossible parameters which are being erroneously...

Daniel M. Hausman and Brynn Welch One of the hottest ideas in current policy debates is “libertarian paternalism,” the design of policies that push individuals toward better choices without limiting their liberty. In their recent book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and then Obama advisor (now head of the White...

Stephen S. Hall "A compelling investigation into one of our most coveted and cherished ideals, and the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue. We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science...

Stephan Schleim , Tade M. Spranger , Susanne Erk, Henrik Walter Various kinds of normative judgments are an integral part of everyday life. We extended the scrutiny of social cognitive neuroscience into the domain of legal decisions, investigating two groups, lawyers and other academics, during moral...

Vladas Griskevicius, Joshua M. Tybur, Bram Van den Bergh Why do people purchase proenvironmental “green” products? We argue that buying such products can be construed as altruistic, since green products often cost more and are of lower quality than their conventional counterparts, but green goods benefit...

Elizabeth Tricomi, Antonio Rangel, Colin F. Camerer, John P. O’Doherty A popular hypothesis in the social sciences is that humans have social preferences to reduce inequality in outcome distributions because it has a negative impact on their experienced reward. Although there is a large body of behavioural...

Reka Daniel and Stefan Pollmann The dopaminergic system is known to play a central role in reward-based learning (Schultz, 2006), yet it was also observed to be involved when only cognitive feedback is given (Aron et al., 2004). Within the domain of information-integration category learning, in which...

Christopher Hemond, Rachel M. Brown, Edwin M. Robertson Humans have a prodigious capacity to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Being distracted while, for example, performing a complex motor skill adds complexity to a task and thus leads to a performance impairment. Yet, it may not be just the presence...