Category Archives: Counterintuitivity

Still not happy with your research topic? These may get you thinking: CLEAN GIRLS GET SICKER? There’s a growing body of research showing that children exposed to lots of germs early in life are less likely to develop allergies, asthma … Continue reading →

The more mammograms a radiologist reads, the more obscure tumors she will find. Just so, I hope you’ll become better attuned to spotting counterintuitivities in everything you read as the semester proceeds. Here are some you may have missed when … Continue reading →

Masters of counterintuitive thinking and popular authors of the book Freakonomics and the companion column in the New York Times, Steven D. Levitt, the economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, the writer, find unexpected explanations for human behavior everywhere they look. … Continue reading →

The very phrase “for-profit prison” should raise a red flag for anyone on the lookout for counterintuitivity. Once governments were the builders, owners, and administrators of prisons, but budgets for government services and capital investments have not kept up with … Continue reading →

If you’re racking your brain for a good counterintuitive research topic, the ecology team at Mother Jones have cooked up a series of columns you should cull for inspiration. They’re full of challenges to “common knowledge” claims many of us … Continue reading →

This is really hard to believe. You’re all familiar with the placebo effect, I imagine. Patients engaged as subjects in a study to test the effectiveness of a new medication routinely receive one of two regimens: half get the actual … Continue reading →