By Rebecca Saxe | TED.com "Sensing the motives and feelings of others is a natural talent for humans. But how do we do it? Here, Rebecca Saxe shares fascinating lab work that uncovers how the brain thinks about other peoples' thoughts -- and judges their actions." Watch the video . Image...

By Joshua Hartshorne | Scientific American "My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable...

By Jack Soll and Richard Larrick from Scientific American. "There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. This saying received empirical support in social psychology in the 1920s, when a series of studies showed that groups were more accurate than their individual members. In an early...

By: Charles Q. Choi from Scientific American "Humans often make irrational choices when faced with challenging decisions. Ant colonies, however, can make perfectly rational selections when confronted by tough dilemmas. This isn't because lone ants are especially knowledgeable—they're not...

By Tom Wujec "Last year at TED we aimed to try to clarify the overwhelming complexity and richness that we experience at the conference in a project called the Big Viz. And the Big Viz is a collection of 650 sketches that were made by two visual artists. David Sibbet from The Grove, and Kevin Richards...

This article from Science News discusses recent research on collective behavior and decision-making in animals, which has interesting implications for researching human wisdom. "Of course honeybees don’t have a banking system, but they do exhibit collective behavior. The queen bee doesn’t decide...

By Joshua M. Ackerman, Christopher C. Nocera, John A. Bargh "Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal...

In order to investigate the impact of limited memory on human behavior, I develop a model of memory grounded in psychological and biological research. I assume that people take their memories as accurate and use them to make inferences. The resulting model predicts both over- and underreaction but provides...