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...

Insect colonies offer insight into the mysterious conversations of neurons, illuminating how billions of individual brain cells work in concert to make a single decision... by Elizabeth Lindhardt in Seed Magazine. Read the article.

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...

By Michael Bond "The protests that took place on the streets of London on the eve of the G20 summit in April lived up to many people's expectations. Around 2000 protestors turned up, and were heavily marshalled by police. There was a bit of trouble, but the police tactics - specifically, the...

By John Tierney "Could it be that humans are not quite as gullible as advertised? For a couple of decades now, social psychologists and behavioral economists have been amusing themselves manipulating consumers into doing odd things. They’ve delighted in debunking the notion of homo economicus, that...

The New Interface of Governance Frontier / by Nancy Scola "If we can just tweak the way we make choices, we can make smarter ones. A look at Obama’s plans to put the science of human nature to work. For those of us familiar with the strange land that is Washington, DC, it’s tempting to snicker a...

This article about economic decision making was written by one of our grant recipients, Sendhil Mullainathan. "All too often, the choices of the poor are viewed as a result of either some intrinsic failing (“they’re just very myopic people”) or some deep psychological feature of poverty (“they’re...

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...

Vladas Griskevicius, Joshua M. Tybur, Bram Van den Bergh Why do people purchase proenvironmental “green” products? We argue that buying such products can be construed as altruistic, since green products often cost more and are of lower quality than their conventional counterparts, but green goods benefit...

by Igor Grossmann, Jinkyung Na, Michael E. W. Varnum, Denise C. Park, Shinobu Kitayama, and Richard E. Nisbett It is well documented that aging is associated with cognitive declines in many domains. Yet it is a common lay belief that some aspects of thinking improve into old age. Speci fi cally, older...

By Qiu J, Li H, Jou J, Liu J, Luo Y, Feng T, and Wu Z, Zhang Q. "In the present study, we used learning-testing paradigm to examine brain activation of "Aha" effects with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during solving Chinese logogriphs. Blood oxygenation level...

The focus on complexity as a problem of the financial meltdown of 2008–2009 suggests that crisis is in part epistemological: we now know enough about financial and economic systems to be threatened by their complexity, but not enough to relieve our fears and anxieties about them. What marks the current...

Elizabeth Tricomi, Antonio Rangel, Colin F. Camerer, John P. O’Doherty A popular hypothesis in the social sciences is that humans have social preferences to reduce inequality in outcome distributions because it has a negative impact on their experienced reward. Although there is a large body of behavioural...

Justin Greaves, Wyn Grant This article argues that interdisciplinary collaboration can offer significant intellectual gains to political science in terms of methodological insights, questioning received assumptions and providing new perspectives on subject fields. Collaboration with natural scientists...

Peter Suedfeld, Rajiv Jhangiani Using integrative complexity scoring, the current study addresses how communications by leaders of India and Pakistan have revealed their information processing and decision-making strategies. The hostility between India and Pakistan started with the official creation...

Marc Hauser and Justin Wood We synthesize the contrasting predictions of motor simulation and teleological theories of action comprehension and present evidence from a series of studies showing that monkeys and apes—like humans—extract the meaning of an event by ( a ) going beyond the surface appearance...

Reka Daniel and Stefan Pollmann The dopaminergic system is known to play a central role in reward-based learning (Schultz, 2006), yet it was also observed to be involved when only cognitive feedback is given (Aron et al., 2004). Within the domain of information-integration category learning, in which...

Christopher Hemond, Rachel M. Brown, Edwin M. Robertson Humans have a prodigious capacity to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Being distracted while, for example, performing a complex motor skill adds complexity to a task and thus leads to a performance impairment. Yet, it may not be just the presence...