dissertation

Who has the best chance of understanding infographics?

This was the ques­tion my disser­ta­tion ended up answer­ing. It wasn’t neces­sar­ily the ques­tion I star­ted with, but hey, that’s science. Or some­thing like it. The answer is (depend­ing on the type of infographic): A man of above aver­age numer­acy with a doctoral-level degree between 45 and 54 years old. Apart from this singu­larly unhelp­ful cari­ca­ture, this is what else I found. […]

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Noted: The Science of Our Optimism Bias

Reading over this article The Science of Our Optimism Bias and the Life-Cycle of Happiness from Brain Pickings, I was struck by the often repeated idea that we are ‘hard­wired’ for optim­ism, and that this isn’t neces­sar­ily a bad thing. But as part of my disser­ta­tion I was look­ing at the differ­ent ways research­ers have tried to affect the way […]

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