In this episode, you will meet two scientists who uncovered the scientific fraud of a colleague, got his work retracted, and then decided to go ahead and start over, do new research themselves and see if the persuasion technique he was studying truly worked.

Despite their relative invisibility, a norm, even a dying one, can sometimes be harnessed and wielded like a weapon by conjuring up old fears from a bygone era.

Statements about things that do not exist can still be logically true, and can also be useful thinking tools. The problem is that sometimes those same arguments are used to prove the existence of fictional things, and that’s when you accidentally commit the existential fallacy.

When additional details make an argument seem more correct, you run the risk of committing the conjunction fallacy.

A question from the Cognitive Reflection Test, an exam often used in psychological research. What answer first comes to mind...and what is the correct answer?

Another question from the Cognitive Reflection Test, an exam often used in psychological research. What answer first comes to mind...and what is the correct answer?

You’ve likely noticed over the years that people often tend to adhere to norms of behavior they internally don’t agree with.

You Are Not So Smart recently teamed up with It's Okay To Be Smart to make a video about why you believed blowing into Nintendo games helped, but...it didn't, at all.

Where did you hear that? According to the experts in this episode, you often overestimate and overstate just how much you can learn about a claim based on where it originated, but it's still a good idea to check your sources anyway.

Test it for yourself in your own town and share your results. I'd love to know how widespread this is.

Without realizing it, you sometimes apply a double standard to the things you love, believe, and consider crucial to your identity.

Another nice breakdown of a chapter from You Are Now Less Dumb by friend of YANSS, Brain Pickings, with plenty of excerpts. (in the UK, YANLD is You Can Beat Your Brain)

Friend of YANSS, Brain Pickings, breaks down a chapter from You Are Now Less Dumb (in the UK, it's You Can Beat Your Brain) with plenty of excerpts:

If you believe something is bad because it is…bad, or that something is good because, well, it’s good, you probably wouldn’t use that kind of reasoning in an argument – yet, sometimes, without realizing it, that’s exactly what you do.

You see some beliefs as true or false, correct or incorrect. Others you see as probabilities, chances – odds. In this episode we explore why you gladly update some beliefs and refuse to update others.

A short video we made when You Are Now Less Dumb first released all about how clothes can affect the wearer's mind:

It is very easy to be both unskilled and unaware of it, and in this episode we explore why that is with professor David Dunning, one of the researchers who first attempted to explain why are so often unaware that we lack the skill to tell how unskilled and unaware we are.

I'm in the middle of writing a new book about how people change their minds. I was just interviewed about it on the Rationally Speaking podcast. Fun stuff! This is the interview: http://bit.ly/1SwHeZ2

When you go looking for something specific, you tend to notice patterns everywhere, which leads you to ask the question, “What are the odds?” Usually, the odds are actually pretty good.

What do you do when a member of a group to which you belong acts in a way that you feel is in opposition to your values? Do you denounce the group, or do you redefine the boundaries of membership?