Psychologyspeaking topic
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”
— Sigmund Freud, letter to Ernest Jones (1933)
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- In-group bias: why do we automatically see people in our own group as better and more in the right? How arbitrary can the foundations of 'us' and 'them' really be?
- The affect heuristic: when we like something, why do we judge its risks as low and its harms as small? Can our feelings quietly make decisions in place of our reasoning?
- The need for competence: feeling yourself getting better at something is motivating all by itself. Are video game leveling systems tapping exactly this need?
- Turning doomscrolling into brain fuel, whether swapping junk feeds for science explainers is real self-improvement or the same compulsion in a smarter outfit.
- Embodied cognition: do thoughts happen only in the brain, or in the body too? Why do we judge a stranger as a 'warmer' person while holding a hot cup of coffee?