Madeleine Brand had me on her KPCC public radio show today to talk about illusory correlations (as they apply to the Juan Williams controversy) and the action bias (as it applies to the upcoming 2010 midterm elections).
Listen here or download the file here http://bit.ly/9OpK5a

http://bit.ly/dkYwC7
Ever hear of the phenomenon called an “illusory correlation”? It explains why commentator Williams, who was recently fired from NPR, associates Muslims at airports with terrorists.
I am going to be writing my next column for Slate about this issue. To whet your appetite, here’s a radio interview about illusory correlations and other biases with Steve [...]

http://bit.ly/aLUkqZ
Lots of people come home from work feeling upset. But it turns out there are systematic gender differences in the way heterosexual men and women bring work-related unpleasant feelings home.
Men, on average, tend to shield their families from unpleasant things that happened at work, and the more satisifed men are in their relationships, the more [...]

http://bit.ly/dbCCmk
The 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Peter Diamond, a champion of the field of behavioral economics. As I am sure you know, behavioral economics is a discipline which shows how people regularly depart from the rational, self-interested behavior that conventional economics suggests is the universal norm. The reason people regularly fail [...]

http://bit.ly/9IMj7P
A variety of research studies show that attractiveness helps people in a variety of professional settings. Defendents in the criminal justice system and children in daycare get away with more lenient punishments when they are attractive, compared to when they are not.
But new research shows that there is a downside to being attractive — when [...]