About these notes
A small set of reading notes on four areas of psychology, kept in the open because writing for an imagined reader is a better test of understanding than writing for oneself.
I am not a psychologist. These pages are the notes of someone who reads the literature as an outsider, and they are written to the standard of "could I explain this correctly to someone who will check". Where I am summarising rather than reporting, I have tried to say so.
The four topics were not chosen for coverage. They were chosen because each one changed how I do something ordinary — how I take notes after an incident, how many things I keep open at once, where I leave my phone, and what I ask before assessing a claim.
What is deliberately missing
- No comments, no contact form, no newsletter. Nothing here needs to collect anything from a reader.
- No analytics and no third-party scripts. There is no JavaScript on any page. Nothing is loaded from another domain; the only external link on the whole site is in the sources below.
- No dates and no "latest". The material is decades old and will not go stale, so dating it would only make it look abandoned.
- No advice beyond what the findings support. Where the research does not license a rule, there is no rule.
On replication
Psychology went through a serious reckoning with reproducibility, and a number of well-known findings did not hold up. It would be convenient to leave that out of a set of notes like these. Instead it shaped which findings appear: I have tried to include effects that have been independently replicated, preferably by researchers with an interest in overturning them, and to flag in the text where something is contested or where the popular version overstates the evidence.
Two examples of that filtering, since the omissions are invisible otherwise. The claim that a habit forms in twenty-one days is not in the habit notes as a fact — it appears only to be contradicted, because the measured distribution is far wider and has no particular peak at three weeks. And the confidence–accuracy relationship in memory is described as weak rather than absent, because under good conditions it is genuinely informative, and the stronger claim is not supportable.
If something here is wrong, it is more likely to be a compression error than a citation error — a hedge dropped, a condition omitted, a laboratory effect stated as though it transferred cleanly to ordinary life. The sources below are the authority; these pages are not.
Sources
Attention
- Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and with two ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
- Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception.
- Monsell, S. (2003). Task switching. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Memory
- Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology.
- Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior.
- Johnson, M. K., Hashtroudi, S., & Lindsay, D. S. (1993). Source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin.
- Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: false recollections of hearing the news about Challenger.
Habit
- Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit–goal interface. Psychological Review.
- Neal, D. T., Wood, W., Wu, M., & Kurlander, D. (2011). The pull of the past: when do habits persist despite conflict with motives? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
- Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist.
- Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: a meta-analysis. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology.
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed? European Journal of Social Psychology.
Judgment
- Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Science.
- Gigerenzer, G., & Hoffrage, U. (1995). How to improve Bayesian reasoning without instruction: frequency formats. Psychological Review.
- Murphy, A. H., & Winkler, R. L. (1977). Reliability of subjective probability forecasts of precipitation and temperature.
- Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. A readable synthesis of the programme, and the source of the "substitution" framing used throughout these notes.
On the replication question
- Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science. Summary and data at osf.io/ezcuj.