Drang naar Samenhang

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: Some years ago I served as an outside member on a dissertation committee in a linguistics department. The gr...

Welcome to a post-publication conversation on social-cognitive priming!  The impetus for the conversation is a social-cognitive priming article by Jostmann, Lakens, and Schubert that was  published in 2009 in  Psychological Science . The article is interesting enough in and of itself but what makes it an even more interesting discussion topic is that the authors themselves have performed and reported replication attempts of some of their findings. In addition, there are replication attempts by others. The authors of the 2009 study, Nils Jostmann (NJ), Daniël Lakens (DL), and Thomas Schubert (TS), plus the author of a replication study, Hans IJzerman (HIJ), kindly agreed to respond to a series of questions I had prepared for them about the research. This allows a behind-the-scenes look of the original study, the decisions to perform replications, the evaluation of the replication attempts, and overall assessments of the main finding. The responses, which were given ...

Last week, David Sedaris gave a reading in Amsterdam as part of his latest book tour. When the performance was over, it dawned on me that something remarkable had happened. More than a thousand Dutch people had just stared for almost two hours at a soft-spoken and not physically imposing American man who was reading from sheets of paper. What was going on? In our modern culture we don't seem to be able to get by without visuals. Schoolbooks are littered with photographs, diagrams, and figures. Most professors are incapable of lecturing without PowerPoint. News programs feature a plethora of graphs, pie charts, and animations. Heck, there even is a photograph on the left of this paragraph! David Sedaris didn’t strut and prance across the stage while gesturing maniacally like a stand-up comedian or an overly excited TED-talker. He didn’t bring any visual props with him and certainly no PowerPoint presentation. Instead he was standing rather motionlessly ...