Why do we behave
the way we do?
Memory, decisions, social behaviour, and crime, explored through experiments you run yourself.
Why do we remember wrong?
Run the experiment 02 · TRUTHDoes saying something twice make it truer?
Run the experiment 03 · TESTIMONYHow accurate is an eyewitness?
Investigate case 001 04 · BEHAVIOURWhat actually explains why someone acts?
Explore the why 05 · ARCHIVEInside a case.
Open case files 06 · THE LABRun an experiment.
Enter the labWhy do we do
what we do?
Five short experiments. What each one is actually about becomes clear once you're in it.
Congruency Test
You'll see 16 words. Each is a colour name, printed in a colour. Ignore what the word says. Click the colour it's printed in, as fast as you can.
Your interference effect
Research note
You almost certainly answered slower, or made more mistakes, on trials where the ink colour and the word disagreed. This is the Stroop effect: reading is so automatic that your brain processes the word before you can stop it, even when the task only asks for the colour. The two responses compete, and that competition costs time. It's one of the most replicated findings in cognitive psychology.
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18(6), 643–662. · MacLeod, C. M. (1991). Half a century of research on the Stroop effect. Psychological Bulletin, 109(2), 163–203.The Memory Test
The Truth Test
The Spot Test
Recall Test
Five real, documented cases. Each one walks through what actually happened, then what the psychological research says about why.
Ronald Cotton
Burlington, North Carolina, 1984. A confident, certain eyewitness identification. A man who served over ten years for a rape he didn't commit, before DNA found the man who did. Investigate → CASE 002The Exonerated Five
Central Park, New York, 1989. Five teenagers, hours of interrogation, five confessions that didn't match each other or the evidence. Thirteen years before the real attacker was found. Investigate → CASE 003Kitty Genovese
Queens, New York, 1964. The murder that supposedly proved thirty-eight people can watch someone die and do nothing. What the story got right, and what it didn't. Investigate → CASE 004The Stanford Prison Experiment
Stanford University, 1971. A two-week study of prison life, shut down after six days. Decades later, researchers went back and asked whether the famous story was actually true. Investigate → CASE 005Ted Bundy
Washington to Florida, 1974–1978. The case most responsible for the "criminal genius" image of a serial killer. The actual psychology behind him looks nothing like that. Investigate →Why do we do
what we do?
Pick the factors researchers actually study. Watch how they combine. There's no score at the end, because behaviour doesn't reduce to one.
Complex behaviour rarely has a single explanation.
Research note
Most modern behavioural science works this way, not only criminology. The biopsychosocial model treats biology, psychology, and social context as jointly necessary explanations rather than competing ones. Developmental criminology finds the same pattern: Terrie Moffitt's taxonomy of offending shows that early-life neurodevelopmental factors and social environment interact over time, rather than either one determining an outcome alone.
Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model. Science, 196(4286), 129–136. · Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior. Psychological Review, 100(4), 674–701.What the evidence
says.
A few common beliefs about why people do what they do, tested against the research instead of intuition.