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Do video games cause violence? A deeper look at the evidence
For almost as long as there have been video games, there have been people arguing that they are bad for you. There also seems to be a wealth of experimental evidence behind it (Hasan et al., 2013, to name just one of many). But there have been suggestions that these negative outcomes are oversold. Problems…
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Collection of criticisms of Adam Perkins’ ‘The Welfare Trait’
In late 2015, Dr Adam Perkins published his book called ‘The Welfare Trait’. The main crux of his argument was that each generation who is supported by the welfare state becomes more work-shy. He also argued that the welfare state increased the number of children born to households where neither parent works. His solution is…
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Are people’s performance impacted by negative stereotypes?
Don’t you just love being wrong? Of course you don’t, no one does. But there is a grim satisfaction in no longer believing something that there isn’t good enough evidence for. This is what I experienced after examining the phenomenon known as ‘stereotype threat’. In short, it’s the idea that groups with negative stereotypes about…
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How biased are you? The role of intelligence in protecting you from thinking biases.
People generally like to believe they are rational (Greenberg, 2015). Unfortunately, this isn’t usually the case (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). People very easily fall prey to thinking biases which stops them from making a purely rational judgement (whether always making a rational judgement is a good thing is a discussion for another time). These are flaws…
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The benefits of single-sex schooling
Many people claim that single-sex (SS) education is better for students than co-educational (CE) e.g. Jackson (2016). There have been criticisms of this idea e.g. Halpern et a. (2011) but generally it is believed to be beneficial. But what does the evidence suggest? A large-scale meta-analysis by Pahlke et al. (2014), involving 184 studies and…
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How views about willpower affect you and your grades
There has been a lot of research into how self-control (defined as “restraint exercised over one’s own impulses, emotions and desires” Merriam-Webster, 2015) is affected by performing tasks that require self-control. One hypothesis with a large amount of experimental evidence to support it is the strength model of self-control (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998;…
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So what are the best learning techniques?
We’ve looked at (some of) the evidence for different learning techniques, but which ones are the most effective? The clear winners are active retrieval and distributed practice (click on each technique for the evidence and a more in-depth analysis), so definitely try and make them a part of your learning/revision schedule. After that, it seems that…
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Active Retrieval
Active retrieval is the method of looking at some information and then testing yourself (either through free-recall or guided recall) to see how much you can remember. But the key aspect of this method is that it isn’t used just to see how much someone has learnt or if there are any gaps in their…
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Summarising
Summarising is taking a large block of text or a large number of ideas and cutting it down to the most important points. It’s the skill of understanding what you’ve just read and picking out the relevant points. It can be used to help initial learning of the material or as a revision technique. Summarising…
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Distributed practice
Distributed practice is the idea of delaying retrieval of information that you want to remember, as opposed to trying to learn the same thing for an extended period of time. Is it better to break up learning sessions about that topic over several days or work at one segment of information for a long period…
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