(This article was coauthored with Kathleen D. Vohs and first published in Dialogue, the newsletter for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, alongside a companion piece by John Bargh and ...

The familiar expression “hindsight is always 20/20” affirms that looking back on a behavior enables you to understand what previously you weren't cognizant of. And that regardless of whether you could ...

Mr. Singal is the author of “The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills.” Long before Reddit users discovered the firefighter Les McBurney, humans were fascinated by the idea that a ...

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. It’s no surprise that Stephen Cave’s story in our current issue, ...

Back in 1814, Pierre-Simon Laplace was mulling over the implications of Newtonian mechanics, and realized something profound. If there were a vast intelligence -- since dubbed Laplace's Demon-- that ...

The takeaway of Robert Sapolsky’s Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will is basically the same as that espoused by those Snickers commercials: You’re not you when you’re hungry. Except ...

IN considering the life of man in history or in contemporary social relations there are two hypotheses open to us. We may postulate that, from the largest sweep of the historic process down to the ...