In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is thought-action fusion. Thought-action fusion (TAF) happens when people believe there is an equivalence between thoughts and actions. It was first described by researchers in relation to OCD, although it’s not exclusive to OCD. There are a couple …
Violent actions are obviously a bad thing, but what about violent thoughts? It’s not exactly socially acceptable to talk about, which makes it hard to get a sense of how common it is. I would guess that it’s fairly common to have the occasional thoughts of violence, even if they’re just fleeting and there’s no …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week we’re going to look at logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are reasoning errors that people make quite commonly when making arguments. While such fallacies don’t necessarily mean that the conclusion is wrong, they’re a weak link in the argument, and …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is belief perseverance. Belief perseverance is the tendency to hold onto beliefs even after the information that they’re based on is shown to be false. I’m a big fan of this line from a paper by Savion (2009): …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the illusion of causality. The illusion of causality is a cognitive bias that makes us see causal relationships between things that aren’t actually related. This often comes into play in superstitions and pseudoscience. We naturally look for …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is the frequency illusion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Do you ever find that once you start to notice something, all of a sudden, it’s happening a lot? There’s a name for that; it’s a type of …
What Is… the Frequency Illusion (Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon) Read More »
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we have two beliefs that conflict, or when our beliefs and actions don’t match, making us feel uncomfortable. The concept was originally described back in the 1950s by psychologist Leon Festinger. …
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week’s term is mentalization. Mentalizing is something you do, but probably haven’t heard of. My browser’s spell-checker tells me it’s not a word. Okay, so what is it? Well, that’s not the easiest thing to explain. Defining mentalism The American …
This post isn’t about saying that suicide is something people should choose, or that it’s a good choice, or that it’s a choice that they want to have on the menu. I’m writing this because, while it’s much more complicated to get into the element of choice, I believe that it’s inaccurate to say that …
Is Suicide a Choice? (Regardless, It’s Not Selfish) Read More »
This post flows from a few different things that other bloggers have been talking about lately. I’ll refer specifically to a couple of posts about faith on Tisha B’Av, a Jewish day of mourning, but this also ties into what some other people have been talking about with regards to subjective vs. objective reality. This …
