Marc Wilson: forget about it

Marc Wilson: forget about it

If you’re like most people, being told that will only make it harder for you to do so.

By Marc Wilson In Psychology

What is a theory? According to Harvard University Professor Daniel Wegner, “You can think of it being like a really stupid person.” He said this at the Association for Psychological Science conference in Washington just after showing a series of schematics for automata – think creepy toy monkeys that bang their cymbals together again and again.

Automata are devices designed to do only one thing and so they need only enough mechanism to perform that action. Wegner was suggesting a theory was similar: if you want to work out why people do something, he said, try to imagine the simplest psychological ...

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