4."When the pandemic started, a friend of mine got really obsessed with the fact that you can't leave your home or go near people without a mask — but it never reflected in his own actions. He judged ...

In the Aesop’s fable, the fox tries hard to get his hands on a tasty vine of grapes, but fails in all of his attempts to acquire the grapes; at which point the fox convinces himself that he really ...

Cognitive dissonance is what happens when a person holds two sets of beliefs at odds with each other. The human brain doesn’t like logical inconsistencies, so someone experiencing cognitive dissonance ...

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This post was updated March 1 at 8:32 p.m. When was the last time you procrastinated? Are you doing it right now? For many college students, procrastination is one of the most common examples of ...

Once upon a time, the words we used had dependable and agreed-upon meanings. Words describing people, events, beliefs, acts, and other experiences were either facts and truths or fictions and ...

In 1934, an 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern India, killing thousands and devastating several cities. Curiously, in areas that were spared the worst destruction, stories soon spread that an even ...

Our skis skidded and chattered as we descended each artificial snow mound, a series of off-white heaps dotting the entire run that seemed more like a series of whale’s bodies than a surface made for ...

If nations can suffer from cognitive dissonance just as individuals can, it’s easy to see why we elected Donald Trump. A good place to start thinking about this is football: As I often do in late ...