sciencebriefs
Topic

Cognitive bias

The systematic ways judgement goes wrong, reliably enough to name.

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9:55

Asch conformity experiments

Solomon Asch

The Asch experiments show that unanimous group pressure causes public conformity on simple perceptual judgments — not because people misperceive, but because they yield in speech. The effect is real, quantified, and limited: it depends on unanimity, not large numbers; it was tested only on white male undergraduates; and it measures response, not belief or vision.

9:58

B. F. Skinner

Skinner didn’t explain minds — he replaced them with measurable behaviour and its consequences.
10:11

Jean Piaget

Piaget didn’t discover how children think—he discovered that we’d been misreading their wrong answers all along.