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Jan 7, 2025 | 
experimental-history.com | Adam Mastroianni
Experimental History has just turned three. In blog years, that makes me old enough to light up a cigar and wax wise. And so, on my blog birthday, I wanna tell you about the two stupid facts I’ve learned in my time on the internet:There are a lot of people in the worldThose people differ a lot from one anotherThese truths are so obvious that nobody even notices them, which is exactly why they’re so potent, and why they keep coming in handy over and over again. Lemme show you how.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
experimental-history.com | Adam Mastroianni
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…because he thought the apocalypse was coming. Like many of his contemporaries, Columbus believed that the Earth was supposed to last for 7,000 years total, with only ~150 years remaining.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
experimental-history.com | Adam Mastroianni
It was October 22nd, 1844, and the world was about to end. Somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 people were looking up at the sky that day, waiting for Jesus to burst through the clouds. Some of them had quit their jobs, left their crops to rot in the fields, sold all their possessions, paid the debts they owed, forgave the debts owed t…
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
experimental-history.com | Adam Mastroianni |Stuart Buck
Even a years ago, if you had tried to talk to me about the “philosophy of science,” I would have skeddadled. Philosophy? As in, people just...saying stuff? No thanks dude, I’m good. I’m a Science Guy, I talk Data. But then I realized something: I had no idea what I was doing. Like, nobody had ever told me what science was or how to do it. My advisor never sat me down and gave me the scientific Birds and the Bees talk (“When a hypothesis and an experiment love each other very much...”).
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
experimental-history.com | Adam Mastroianni
A lot of people would like to make the world better, but they don’t know how. This is a great tragedy. It’s tragic not only for the people who need help, but also for the people who can help, because good intentions start to rot if you don’t act them out.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
experimental-history.com | Adam Mastroianni |Max Nussenbaum |Lisa Sibbett
It’s Election Day in the US, which means everybody is waiting in lines and refreshing their newsfeeds all day, looking for things to do in between bouts of freaking out. So I’m gonna keep things light with the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a roundup of stuff I’ve been reading for the past few months. We’ve known since Roman times that lead pipes can poison people. So uh...why have we used them for ~2000 years? Have we just been poisoning ourselves all this time?
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Oct 31, 2024 | 
botharetrue.substack.com | Sari Azout |Yancey Strickler |Leandra M. Cohen |Adam Mastroianni
For the past few months, I’ve been having pretty dope, v vulnerable conversations with people who inspire me. The result, about which I am still in disbelief, is a physical and digital print publication called… Whoa, Vol. 1Conversations To Make You Feel HumanThe zine opens with a lil letter from me which I wanted to share with you all below.
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Oct 23, 2024 | 
experimental-history.com | Adam Mastroianni
This is joint work with Jason Dana and Kris Nichols. You can download a PDF version of this paper on PsyArxiv. I dunno if you’ve heard, but Democrats and Republicans do not like each other. 83% of Democrats have an unfavorable view of Republicans, and Republicans return the lack of favor in similar numbers.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
experimental-history.com | Adam Mastroianni
It’s nuts how many people feel like imposters. Apparently 82% of Italian neurosurgeons, 56% of Romanian psychology undergrads, and 39% of Korean Catholics report at least moderate symptoms of Imposter Syndrome. That’s a whole lotta folks feeling like they’re frauds. I think there’s two things going on here, one obvious, one mysterious. First, the obvious: a lot of people feel like imposters because other people make them feel that way.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
experimental-history.com | Adam Mastroianni |Paul Bloom |Maia Mindel |Jason Collins
There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years: we’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers and…then what? The stack of papers just gets taller? This worries me because I want to contribute to the grand project of understanding the mind, but I’m not sure how to do that. What’s the point of tossing another paper on the pile when it’s not clear that the last 100 papers added anything?
