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Ed Yong’s article in The Atlantic highlights the problem that research in psychology, and in other fields as well, is predominantly practised on people from WEIRD societies.

This is the second of two posts gathering a few thoughts about my experience of trying to put together Proper Psychology Experiments in collaboration with brilliant scientist colleagues.

Shakespeare was clearly familiar with the principles of faculty psychology handed down to the Renaissance from antiquity, according to which “imagination” is the part of the soul responsible for creating “phantasms”

Kevin M. Carlsmith, Timothy D. Wilson, and Daniel T. Gilbert, ‘The Paradoxical Consequences of Revenge’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95 (2008), 1316-24.

well. The book in question is Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2002).

The guest was Steven Pinker (Psychology, Harvard), author of several important books on language and thought, and also of The Better Angels of our Nature, for which I have a soft

persuasiveness of the portraits of psychology we get there.

Experimental social psychology aims to produce controlled, accurate accounts of interpersonal dynamics of all kinds; theatre and literary criticism aim, at least in one tradition, to provide accurate accounts of how

Good title: it made me think of a popular psychology version of Ovid’s great epic poem the Metamorphoses.

for instance, when we read the newspaper, watch TV, or participate in a psychology experiment on argument evaluation’.