People often cheat to win money, get prizes, or beat others. But what if there’s nothing to gain except feeling good about yourself? Would people still bend the rules just to feel a bit smarter, more ...

Come on. Be honest — how well do you get along with others? When asked to compare your amiability to your peers, are you above, below or at average? In 1977, the College Board asked 829,000 high ...

Many of the things we believe about ourselves and our experiences turn out to be false. Sometimes this is due to innocent memory failures or to the lack of needed information. Suppose that Charles ...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Fool me once, shame on you. Fool myself, and I may end up feeling smarter, according to a new study led by Sara Dommer, assistant professor of marketing at Penn State. Dommer ...

Two posts ago, I explored the usefulness and limitations of an analogy between computing and the brain. In my last post, I explored the brain’s dependency on defense mechanisms including denial to ...