I'd love to, but in case of psychology, many of them (or, conclusions drawn from them) just sound plain nonsense.
EDIT: I'm searching for original paper on Shiv experiment. It might be that cognitive load makes our decision less rational, but I'm not buying choosing salad over cake as a rationality test.
It seems that they also asked people to rate the rationality of their choice - whether they believe the cake/salad is good for health, a wise choice, etc. Given this data the result and conclusions sound a bit more reasonable.
I try to trust peer reviewed papers (if we can't trust them, what can we trust?), but I also try to keep my bullshit meter well calibrated. There's enough of pseudo-scientific "knowledge" circulating around. Just look at 7-38-55 (spoken-voice-body language) "rule of communication" and 'cone of learning' ("we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, ...") - it gets repeated around all the time, but if you think of it, it makes no sense. And, in fact, it's totally not true. It's just a result of a big misinterpretation of some scientific studies.
EDIT: I'm searching for original paper on Shiv experiment. It might be that cognitive load makes our decision less rational, but I'm not buying choosing salad over cake as a rationality test.
EDIT2: Found it.
http://www.mendeley.com/research/heart-and-mind-in-conflict-...
It seems that they also asked people to rate the rationality of their choice - whether they believe the cake/salad is good for health, a wise choice, etc. Given this data the result and conclusions sound a bit more reasonable.
I try to trust peer reviewed papers (if we can't trust them, what can we trust?), but I also try to keep my bullshit meter well calibrated. There's enough of pseudo-scientific "knowledge" circulating around. Just look at 7-38-55 (spoken-voice-body language) "rule of communication" and 'cone of learning' ("we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, ...") - it gets repeated around all the time, but if you think of it, it makes no sense. And, in fact, it's totally not true. It's just a result of a big misinterpretation of some scientific studies.