Drang naar Samenhang

In my previous post I described our replication attempt of Experiment 1 from Vohs and Schooler (2008) . They found large effects of a manipulation of belief in free will (via the reading of passages) on people’s reported belief in free will and on subsequent cheating behavior. We tried to replicate these findings using Mechanical Turk but obtained null results. What might account for the stark differences between our findings and those of V&S? And, in the spirit of the educational roots of this project, what lessons can we learn from this attempt at replication? One obvious difference between our findings and those of V&S is in subject populations. Our subjects had an average age of 33 (range 18-69) and were native speakers of English residing in the US (75 males and 77 females). The distribution of education levels was as follows: high school (13%), college no-degree (33%), associate’s degree (13%), bachelor (33%), and master’s/PhD (8%). How about t...

update April 2, 2025.  This blog,  Drang naar Samenhang  will feature posts in Dutch from now on—but no worries, English speakers, I’ve got you covered too. I have launched Substack newsletter called  Craving Coherence :  https://rolfzwaan.substack.com . You don’t need to subscribe to read the posts—just hit  “No thanks”  if prompted. Of course, I’d really appreciate it if you  do  sign up. It’s completely free! So what is the newsletter about?  Why do we search for patterns, craft narratives, and cling to meaning? Craving Coherence explores the psychology of understanding—the mental shortcuts, biases, and frameworks that shape how we interpret reality. From cognitive science to philosophy, this newsletter examines how our minds construct coherence in an often chaotic world—and what happens when they fail. I hope to see you there! Back to the original post: Earlier this year I taught a new course titled Foundations of Cognition . The c...

In the wake of the discovery of mirror neurons an armada of studies on the role of the brain’s motor system in language processing has appeared over the horizon the past decade. We review some of this work  here . Behavioral studies have shown interactions between reading and motor tasks and brain-imaging studies have shown that (pre)-motor areas of the brain are active during the processing of action words and action sentences. Some researchers have taken mirror neuron theory and these results to mean that the motor system plays a central role in language comprehension, whereas others are downright skeptical about the role of the motor system. In our own behavioral studies, we have found interactions between language comprehension and motor actions. Although one can draw limited conclusions from such experiments, they do suggest that motor resonance is modulated by sentence context. You can observe interactions between reading and action only when the fo...