Twenty questions about how your mind works, from memory and habits to the biases that fool everyone, each with the finding behind the answer. Play them as a quiz, or read the list with the answers marked.
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The same questions as the quiz, right answer highlighted and the fact under it. Print the page for a quiz night: the print layout keeps the questions and answers only. The Psychology topic in Lock&Learn holds 132 facts in all.
Who decides first: you, or your brain?
Your brain can decide seconds before 'you' do. Brain scans can predict simple choices several seconds before people report consciously making them.
Source: Nature Neuroscience (2008)
Why do you forget why you entered the room?
Walking through a doorway really does make you forget. Psychologists call it the doorway effect: crossing a boundary cues the brain to archive one scene and load the next.
Source: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Who overestimates their abilities the most?
The least skilled are the most confident. The Dunning-Kruger effect: without the skill to judge quality, beginners can't see their own gaps, so confidence outruns competence.
Source: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1999)
How reliable are your favourite memories?
Every time you recall a memory, you rewrite it. Recalling a memory makes it temporarily unstable: it's re-stored with small edits, so oft-told memories drift furthest from the truth.
Source: Nature reviews on memory reconsolidation
Can faking a smile change how you feel?
Smiling can nudge your mood, even a posed one. A large multi-lab study found that posing a genuine-style smile modestly lifts reported mood: the face talks back to the brain.
Source: Nature Human Behaviour (2022)
Why do songs grow on you?
You like things simply because they're familiar. The mere-exposure effect: repeated contact with almost anything (faces, songs, shapes) makes us like it more.
Source: Zajonc, APA
How many things can you really keep in mind at once?
Your working memory holds only about four things. The classic 'seven items' has been revised down: most people can juggle just three to five chunks at a time.
Source: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2001)
Why do shops show the expensive item first?
The first number you hear skews every estimate after it. Anchoring bias: even a random number silently drags your later judgments toward it. Negotiators and retailers use it constantly.
Source: Tversky & Kahneman
How much of today will you spend not 'here'?
Your mind wanders nearly half your waking hours. A Harvard study pinged thousands of people at random moments: minds were off-task about 47% of the time, and less happy for it.
Source: Science (2010), Harvard
Did everyone really see your awkward moment?
People notice your slip-ups far less than you think. The spotlight effect: we drastically overestimate how much others notice about us. Most people are too busy starring in their own show.
Source: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2000)
What is your brain doing at 3 a.m.?
Your brain replays the day while you sleep. During deep sleep, the hippocampus replays new experiences to the cortex, converting them into long-term memories.
Source: Nature Reviews Neuroscience
In which language do you make your most level-headed decisions?
You make more rational choices in a foreign language. The foreign-language effect: thinking in a second language creates emotional distance, reducing biases in risky decisions.
Source: Psychological Science (2012)
Is 'it's on the tip of my tongue' universal?
'Tip of the tongue' happens in nearly every language. Almost every studied language has a phrase for it, and sign language users get a 'tip of the fingers' state.
Source: Psychological Bulletin
Can a sugar pill work if you KNOW it's sugar?
Placebos can work even when you know they're placebos. In open-label placebo trials, patients told 'this is an inert pill' still reported real symptom relief.
Source: Harvard Medical School
Laptop or pen: which remembers better?
Handwritten notes beat typed ones for remembering. Writing by hand is slower, which forces you to summarize instead of transcribe, and summarizing is where learning happens.
Source: Psychological Science (2014)
How many people can be given a childhood memory that's pure fiction?
A quarter of people can be given a memory that never happened. In the 'lost in the mall' studies, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus convinced about 25 percent of people they'd been lost as a child, an event that never occurred.
Source: Wikipedia
Do crowds really ignore people in trouble?
Bystanders actually step in most of the time. The 'nobody helps' cliche is wrong. A study of hundreds of real street conflicts caught on CCTV found someone stepped in about 90 percent of the time.
Source: Wikipedia
Are you living this exact instant, or a slightly older one?
You live about a tenth of a second in the past. Your brain waits roughly 100 milliseconds to gather sight, sound and touch and line them up into one moment, so the 'now' you feel has already happened.
Source: Wikipedia
If someone's forced to argue a side, do we still think they mean it?
We read forced opinions as a person's true belief. Even told a debater's stance was picked by a coin toss, people still judged the argument as the writer's genuine view, a snag called the attribution error.
Source: Wikipedia
Which comes first, seeing a face or knowing you saw it?
Your brain spots a face before you consciously see it. Neurons react to a face a fraction of a second before the conscious mind registers the image. Your brain flags a face before 'you' notice it.
Source: Wikipedia
This page has 20, each with three answers and the fact that settles it. They are the first 20 of the 132 facts in the Psychology topic of Lock&Learn, which holds the rest.
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