Psychology

I’ve been an arachnophobe my whole life. I can’t remember a time when videos of spiders, or even photos or drawings, didn’t give me palpitations. As a kid Charlotte’s Web read as sinister propaganda. Even as an adult, just hearing the word ‘tarantula’ would make me feel like one was crawling on me (kind friends and colleagues took to calling it ‘the t-word’). I wish I could blame someone for these fears, but no one else in my immediate family screamed uncontrollably when a house spider scuttled across the floor. A fear of spiders is the third most common phobia in the UK, so I know I haven’t been alone.

I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have been removed from it. A spokesman proclaimed: ‘In an effort to make the puzzle more accessible, we are reviewing the solutions and removing obscure or potentially insensitive words over time. HARRY is an example of an obscure word.’ Other more obviously ‘insensitive’ words had already been removed, such as ‘sluts,’ ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’, and though I’m the most rad of femmes, I do wish they’d stayed. Removing ribaldry makes the language increasingly bland. ‘Sensitivity’ is one of those words that’s changed its meaning. It was once used mostly to refer

There was a time when supposedly serious commentators on world affairs used to at least feign historical knowledge. They might quote Bismarck or Castlereagh. Now, international relations punditry, like almost everything else, has succumbed to the language of pop psychology. Vladimir Putin is ‘gaslighting’ the Russian people, we are told, motivated by his ‘hypermasculinity’. His invasion of Ukraine is, according to one commentator on Radio 4 this morning, ‘unforgivable abuse’. I thought abuse meant kicking a dog or being cruel to a partner. Now it means starting a war. It’s almost as though we’re unable to think of Putin as anything other than a nasty contestant on reality TV. Take

If I could lift one thing from younger generations, unpeel one idea from their anxious minds, it would be the notion they have to ‘work on themselves’, and that the point of life is to do this ‘work’ until they feel able to have a relationship, at which point they must grimly set about working on that. I’m not suggesting that it’s not useful to have treatment or therapy for a particular problem, but it’s as if everyone born after 1990 thinks of themselves the way 1950s man thought of his car — as something to be worked on in every spare moment, tinkered with and polished, but rarely taken

The headline looked promising: ‘How to argue with a Covid anti-vaxxer.’ And, yes, a Times colleague had put together a good, informative feature assessing some of the bogus arguments flying around in this pandemic. But it was not what I was looking for. Since undergraduate days I’ve been fascinated by the category of mental imbalance we call paranoia, believing its milder manifestations to be present to some degree in all of us. Mass paranoia is plainly a strand in the anti-vax movement, and I’ve been listening to a powerful BBC Radio 4 and podcast series researched and presented by Jon Ronson, Things Fell Apart. Ronson looks into the rise of

Steven Pinker’s latest book is called Rationality. Rory Sutherland is The Spectator’s Wiki Man. We arranged for them to meet at the Cucumber restaurant, where they discussed the logic of monarchy, gender-bending, and why academics are unreasonably obsessed with wine. Steven Pinker: Part of the reason I wrote Rationality was to ask, how there can be so much irrationality in an era that has the resources for unprecedented rationality. We invented a vaccine for Covid in less than a year. So why do people today believe in conspiracies like QAnon? Rory Sutherland: Conspiracy theories aren’t always irrational, and instinctive responses can serve you well. An instinctive person with no knowledge

In idle chatter the other evening, somebody pooh-poohed champagne. He was a brave soul because in certain circles — and this was among them — one is presumed to think the presence of champagne a mark of opulence, extravagance, a special occasion, a treat. In even more exalted circles, of course, a display is made of not thinking it a treat but a staple, and babbling in a familiar manner about ‘Bolly’ as though one had proceeded straight from the breast to the bubbly without passing through lemonade on the way. ‘To be honest,’ said my friend, ‘if Fate were to touch my shoulder and whisper that I would never