Moral Hazards and Women’s Lacrosse This week, I team up Decision Science News for a joint post. — Enjoy The New York Times just ran a piece called “A Case Against Helmets in Lacrosse“. The hook of the article is that wearing helmets, which one would expect to make the
One day in HuRL, the Humor Research Lab, we were talking about our favorite sites on the Cheezburger Network (my favorite is FailBook, in case you care). Among other reasons, we decided that as scientist who study humor, we should be able to build a successful humor website. The team
[An early post this week.] The Super Bowl featured numerous injuries, but not all of them occurred on the field. According to a recent paper, violence as a means of humor in advertising is on the rise. Two of the top five rated ads from Super Bowl XLV (2011) featured
I recently returned from the Humor pre-conference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. I got a chance to talk to Bob Mankoff, a cartoonist and the Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker. I asked him: Why aren’t The New Yorker’s cartoons funnier? (sic) His answer is compelling. Yes,
I have ESP on my mind lately (see this post and this post). A potentially controversial paper on ESP authored by Daryl Bem and colleagues, which is forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, got me wondering about an important questions about the peer-review process: In spite of
Apes, babies, and people everywhere (with the possible exception of Switzerland) enjoy humor. But why is humor so prevalent? And why is it so pleasurable? Why do we seek spouses, friends, books, movies, television programs, websites, and LOL cat photographs that make us laugh? Most likely, humor is ubiquitous and
Kelly Herd is a PhD student at the Leeds School of Business. Kelly’s expertise is in the area of consumer behavior, creativity, and innovation. I asked her when is “too many choices” not too many choices? Her response: . . Kelly’s research highlights a limitation of the emerging belief that
I recently wrote a post about ESP, where I mentioned work by Daryl Bem. Yesterday’s New York Times reports a forthcoming and controversial paper by Bem (LINK). The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell,
What does a man become when divorced from possessions? As Peter McGraw prepares to leave Denver for Bogotá, I discover that getting rid of
Welcome to the final episode of I’M NOT JOKING. Comedian JD Lopez returns from Episode 1 to debrief and reflect on Peter’s experience building
