Steven
Pinker’s Mind Games Quiz
According
to Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, why do the office workers
in the comic strip think they have learned something?
Steven
Pinker is every bit the populist. All but three of his nine books are aimed at
the general public (“The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has
Declined” is available in 21 formats and editions; the CD comes out this week).
Dr. Pinker’s teaching is similarly accessible. Just look at the test questions
here, culled from one of his Harvard courses, “Psychological Science.” He
explains his approach: “The questions that psychology tackles are the ones that
obsess us in everyday life: family relations, sexuality, kindness and
aggression, the reliability of knowledge. Not surprisingly, many concepts in
academic psychology have crossed over into popular culture, such as
conditioning, Freudian psychoanalysis and cognitive dissonance. Exams that
invoke these memes test whether students understand the theories well enough to
reason about them when they are presented away from a familiar textbook context
and are applied to real life.”
Take the quiz:
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