Fooling the central governor: the tragic story of Tom Simpson

The famous and controversial Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University, demonstrated the power of social roles, social norms, and scripts.

In warehouse roofing applications, corrugated or curved metal sheets are commonly used to improve structural strength, water drainage, and ventilation efficiency. To accurately estimate material requirements and optimize design parameters, engineers must determine the curved surface area of these sheets. Because the sheet profiles often repeat smoothly along their length, they can be effectively approximated by parabolic curves, enabling the use of numerical integration techniques for area...

Simpson’s Rule is a numerical integration method used to approximate the value of a definite integral when an exact antiderivative is difficult or impossible to obtain. The method estimates area by fitting a unique parabola through three equally spaced points on a curve and then integrating the resulting quadratic function over the interval. By using only a small number of sampled values, Simpson’s Rule provides an accurate approximation for many smoothly varying functions.A common practical...

Deception is a pervasive aspect of human communication. Empirical studies have shown that most individuals engage in some form of deceit on a daily basis, with approximately 20% of social exchanges involving deceptive elements. Lying follows a developmental trajectory, peaking during adolescence and declining with age, possibly due to the maturation of cognitive control and social accountability.Cognitive and Social Factors in Deception DetectionDespite its prevalence, accurately detecting...

Obedience to authority is classically demonstrated in a more famous series of social psychology experiments performed by Stanley Milgram. He was a social psychology professor at Yale who was influenced by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal. Eichmann’s defense for the atrocities he committed was that he was “just following orders.”

False memories represent a cognitive distortion in which individuals recall events that did not happen, or remember them in an altered form. This phenomenon highlights the brain's constructive nature in processing and recalling memories, emphasizing that memory is not a perfect representation of past events but rather a dynamic reconstruction influenced by various factors.
One primary source of false memories is misattribution, where individuals incorrectly associate external information with...