Course: The Mind is Flat: The Shocking Shallowness of Human Psychology

This week, we focused on how incredible complexity can emerge in the absence of design – where do languages, cultures and societies come from? Termites, which are incredibly simple beings, …

This week, we are picking up on some threads from last week and focusing on the origin of language and the complexity of society more generally, but shifting focus from …

Is ‘we-thinking’ really crucial to the construction of human culture and society? Does this create a fundamental divide between human society and ‘societies’ of non-human animals (such as termites, ants …

In this first video of the week I begin to expand the discussion from the ways we each make decisions on our own, to the factors that come into play …

So far, in weeks 1 to 4, we have been thinking, primarily, about individual minds; although we have thought from time to time about how our beliefs, preferences and actions …

A natural perspective on personality is to think we just have them and they determine our behaviour. So the personality’s in there, and that just shapes the way we do …

The general point that the mind can only do one thing at a time (with some exceptions) is a crucial and very general limit on how we think. Now clearly …

Psychologists often seem to paint people in a pretty poor light. It is certainly newsworthy, and often very informative, when an experiment shows that people make inconsistent choices, or we …

It turns out that ‘money pump’ arguments can be made to justify a lot of different national principles. For example, rather incredibly, it turns out that if you violate the …

In the last two weeks, we have talked about the idea that hidden mental depth is an illusion and that our brains, in particular, see the world in comparative, rather …

Governments have to have some way of figuring out whether they’re succeeding or failing, and the way they’ve tended to do this is by looking at some sort of measure …

This week, we’re going to talk about the relativity of the mind. You’ve heard about relativity in physics, of course, and luckily, relativity in the context of psychology is much …

We covered a lot of ideas this week! Here’s a brief summary to help you get your head around it all. There’s an intuitive picture of the mind that most …

Welcome to Week 2 of The Mind is Flat. Last week, we focused on challenging the notion of ‘mental depth’. This suggested we do not really know how big or …