Technology, power and human behaviour inside modern systems.
Field Notes
Writer at Silicon Canals

Field Notes

Contributor

Field Notes is Silicon Canals' column on the human behaviour behind the work — decision-making, attention, identity, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work. Articles under this column are produced by our editorial team under the direction of the Chief Publisher.

Relationships & Society

Thinking it over tends to improve how people judge your character, mainly if they…

In three studies with 896 American adults, a stranger described as deliberating before taking a political position was rated higher in moral character than one described as answering without deliberating, but the gain showed up among participants who disagreed with the position. Among participants who already agreed, deliberating made no measurable difference, because the same pause reads as thoughtfulness and as doubt at once, and in the two studies that measured it, the doubt only counted against a stranger the participant already thought was right. Moral character was the only outcome variable, and the third study's central test missed significance.

Sep 7, 2026
Relationships & Society

1,339 teachers were each shown a student’s exercise with a wrong mark already on it, and…

A preregistered experiment in Greece put the right answer within reach of anyone who read the screen, then varied who was said to have set the mark. The label changed how teachers marked when the mark was too harsh and left no detectable trace when it was too generous, and within the harsh version it reached significance among the younger, the better-qualified, the humanities-trained and the more tech-confident, not their counterparts.

Sep 5, 2026
Relationships & Society

Research suggests we file the strangers we deal with under the job independently of the…

Three preregistered online experiments by Yale researchers, 300 US adults in each, timed how fast people read short stories about ordinary errands. In the first two studies, naming a job kept reading at its usual pace, and departing from what the job licenses slowed it down: its script in the first, its private knowledge in the second. In the third, replacing one job-holder with another read about the same as nobody being replaced at all, though the paper never tests those two conditions against each other. The limits are the authors' own: US participants, US jobs, and roles named in words rather than read off a uniform.

Sep 4, 2026