Questions tagged [psychology]
For questions relating to the thoughts and decision making processes of beings.
28
votes
4answers
4k views
How likely are Coriolis-effect-based quirks to develop in starship crew members?
This one's more sociological, and it seems like a shoe-in to me, but sociology was never my strength.
Given how pronounced the Coriolis effect of a smaller Von Braun wheel would be, does it seem ...
0
votes
3answers
314 views
How long can a human stand to be underground?
How long can a man survive underground without going insane?
A traveler is buried under stones in a cave system. His only sources of food are mushrooms and creatures that live in the caves. Some of ...
-1
votes
1answer
108 views
Societies are built on PR stints and propaganda. Why are people okay with this? [closed]
Every time I read, I find out that more and more 'truths', 'traditions', 'common knowledge', etc. were fabricated by some PR person in the not too distant past. People are okay with this though, and ...
2
votes
2answers
85 views
Regulating my replica soldiers with a controlled form of ASPD (I'm not sure if psychopathy belongs to it)?
When you have around 500 soldiers with state-of-the-art equipment and superhuman reflexes, you might also want to invest in a reliable way of controlling them without hampering their ability to think ...
2
votes
3answers
197 views
How to make society ravaged by random killing, prosper and remain happy?
Set in near future.
Human population is at most a hundred thousand.
Everyone lives in mountainous regions to escape deadly miasma.
The air is infected by nanites which can cause cardiac arrest in ...
-1
votes
2answers
166 views
Could implanting false memories change someone's perception immediately? [closed]
This question is about how the brain works in that aspect, if it's even known.
I mean with the question that a person might react to something with fear, happiness, disappointment, or whatever other ...
33
votes
18answers
5k views
How can changes in personality/values of a person who turned into a vampire be explained?
Vampires don't die from old age; They aren't born, and all vampires were humans at some point in their life.
After being bitten, a human can turn into a vampire (although the chance is very low, ...
3
votes
5answers
221 views
How can humans naturally develop the ability to control their mental faculties while suffering the physical effects of fear?
Fear has been a helpful trait that has kept our race alive since back in the day. It continues to be necessary for survival as a species. However, it can be just as harmful. When faced with death or ...
2
votes
6answers
294 views
Can humans be conditioned to become non-violent and forget how to defend themselves?
Okay, so here's a quick scenario. Humans over the course of time have been selected to breed based on how docile they are. The violent ones are exterminated and all outside sources have been shut out. ...
0
votes
3answers
96 views
Why would a religious person extract the hemoglobin of those who failed to survive his spiritual healing ritual? [closed]
This is for a crime/mystery novel with a religious antagonist. He’s trying to cure people of their psychological issues, by creating a “nightmare world” inside their mind and hoping that their ego is ...
14
votes
14answers
7k views
How would aliens test humans for empathy?
500,000 people have been kidnapped from all over the world by aliens.
The aliens want to see if humans have empathy, and they can't understand our languages, as we speak they hear just random noises ...
6
votes
4answers
267 views
How to break down consciousness/soul from an alchemical perspective
I am trying to describe consciousness from a magic elementalist perspective. I've dug through a ridiculous amount of pages of occult alchemical lore without success. My goal is to learn if students ...
37
votes
13answers
8k views
Scientific/biological basis of someone with unlimited willpower?
Meet Greg. Greg was born with pretty average genetics. It seems like he was destined to have average intelligence, average strength, and be average at everything. There was one particularly though: he ...
-1
votes
2answers
97 views
How to discover hiding modified humans and their missions? [closed]
Consider an earthlike world where the following happened:
An UFO "crashed" somewhere on Earth some yrs ago.
It sunk into a swamp and was never found (since the swamp was huge and the UFO was small).
...
2
votes
8answers
456 views
What are the motives of spell teaching spirits?
In my world, there are spirits who can "trade" with humans. The trade is done when a spirit swears to gods to be a human's servant for using a specific spell (for example, in case of fireball, the ...
12
votes
5answers
2k views
Psychology of Long Life
I'm writing a novel about a (small) group of people with extraordinarily long lifespans.
Now I am wondering on the psychological aspects of that, which has been a side-topic here and there in similar ...
3
votes
1answer
155 views
History without resource driven wars
Usually when a population overgrows it expands in search of new land and if the fields are virgin and empty they become farmland and cities, but if the fields are already occupied and the resources ...
1
vote
3answers
140 views
Beings in Amnesia occuring after sleep, how to help them?
A planet is in the brink of destruction with constant wars and chaos.
To somehow save their world a group of scientists launched a nuclear warhead
all over their planet to release a gas that would ...
5
votes
2answers
379 views
How can I make this religion believing in “creating time traveling gods through science” believable?
I want to popularize the following or a similar belief.
In many thousand years people will travel back in time to give us an afterlife, if we make it possible, by going the steps, that will lead to ...
3
votes
2answers
94 views
Long-term effects of leaving everything you know - the aging issue
My current ongoing science fiction project has FTL travel that is instantaneous for the ships and their crews, but still, usually, takes years of real-time in the rest of the universe. This is going ...
1
vote
5answers
273 views
Is it possible for non-mainstream science to be more successful than mainstream science and still being ignored? [closed]
Suppose there is a society where there is a majority consensus on certain principles within science. On laws and mechanisms. However, suppose that minority actually does alternative science that ...
18
votes
1answer
2k views
Are competitive sports an effective way to change my Spartiates' life perspective?
I am creating a world in which a society exists that is heavily inspired that ancient Sparta, specifically with a focus on Spartiates and their military education, the agoge. A character in the story ...
24
votes
12answers
7k views
How would a child with a thousand years of experience behave?
Here's one to ponder: what would an immortal eight-year-old be like after one thousand years?
In most stories involving immortality, the immortals are fully formed adults. When those stories do ...
1
vote
2answers
178 views
What psychological effect would have interacting only with clones of yourself?
Say we are able to mass produce clones for our clone army and give them memories. Then we decide to give them the same template/personality/identity/etc.
What psychological effects would this have on ...
11
votes
5answers
724 views
How to reveal that one friend is a hallucination without revealing which one? [closed]
So, I'm working on a video game wherein there's a lot of supernatural stuff "legitimately" going on around the player, but the player character is also schizophrenic, and realizes as much. So what's ...
8
votes
8answers
2k views
Are there alternative ways aliens would think and feel emotions?
Before I start, let me say that I know that what animals think and feel and whether they do it is a highly, highly debated topic. But, for this question, let us just assume that many animals think - ...
2
votes
3answers
166 views
Theoretical: If you were to psychologically examine people that have time-traveled, what would you look for?
Let us say there is an adult male, adult female, a boy, and a girl. They experience time-travel.
As a psychologist, what would you examine before and after the travel to ensure that psychologically, ...
0
votes
2answers
162 views
How deep would a pit have to be to make climbing out implausible
Assuming that there is a prison somewhat akin to the one in The Dark Knight Rises, except being nothing more than a cylindrical hole in the earth, how deep would it have to be to make escape attempts ...
3
votes
6answers
327 views
Would a “perfect” clone ever rebel against the original? [closed]
I'm creating this character that has the ability to replicate herself. Her power works like this:
She can make a perfect copy of herself, which means that even her memories, thoughts and feelings are ...
7
votes
5answers
422 views
What are some not-so-obvious effects a person might experience if they were still conscious and active, but didn't have a heartbeat? [RE: Vampires]
I'm writing something in which the main character has become a vampire, or vampire-like entity, due to the influence of a Lovecraftian horror.
What are some things they, as a conscious person, may or ...
2
votes
3answers
308 views
Trans-humans: neural chip implants and the Dunning-Kreuger effect
Premise
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a sociological / psychological phenomenon whereby low-skilled individuals mistakenly think they are good at something. In other words, individuals lack the meta-...
6
votes
2answers
177 views
Language features of solitary mesocarnivorous humanoids
The Background
I have a species of intelligent humanoids roughly modelled after bears. They're hulking great grizzly-sized solitary mesocarnivores. Genus Homo and descended from H. sapiens, but ...
0
votes
4answers
144 views
Why Would People Follow an Anti-Christ or a Similar Figure? [duplicate]
Why would people follow the Anti-Christ, or a similar figure? I can imagine some would follow him out of fear, some out of a desire to hurt others, and others out of greed, but what other reasons ...
9
votes
11answers
3k views
Reasons why a Mind Reader would not disclose their abilities [closed]
Setting Background:
Our boring, magicless Earth.
Character Concept: Sarah can read minds. The longer and closer she's with someone the "deeper" she reads them. This starts from basic surface thoughts ...
5
votes
5answers
380 views
What would happen if the minds of predators and prey suddenly swapped? [closed]
Just a silly idea for some sort of potentially major event, but what would happen if say the mind of cat entered the body of a mouse and vice versa, for every animal on Earth? Let's also assume that ...
0
votes
1answer
136 views
Body switch justification [closed]
The scenario is simple: A man switches body with another. Social implications are not the issue here, but the "collateral effects" of body switching.
The Ghost Brigades is a book that touches in this ...
0
votes
3answers
542 views
Ratio of LGBTQ Individuals? [closed]
I had an idea involving a society where LGBTQ individuals are more accepted than in our own world, but I need advice on the population ratios. I heard somewhere that somewhere around 90% of people ...
31
votes
13answers
8k views
On a Speedster's perception of time and ability to function in civilian life
All right, I'm whipping up a speedster character. Figured if she's going to run real quick she'll have to think very quickly so that she doesn't end up as a smear against a wall. So, I did some ...
-4
votes
1answer
121 views
Encouraging Kindness in Rich People? [closed]
As the video linked here shows, there is some evidence linking greater wealth to a greater chance of being more of a jerk. Assuming that we're talking about humans or a sapient race with more or less ...
2
votes
3answers
177 views
Psychological Effects of being the World's only supernatural creature [closed]
Here's the pitch: A character gets outed as a supernatural creature. This person grew up around normal humans, grew up into adulthood (without anyone finding out what they are), and even has normal ...
1
vote
3answers
197 views
Human Hive Mind Alterations
Context
I got this man who can control millions of insects at a time to fight. He accomplishes this thanks to the microbots(smaller than bacteria) in his nervous system that react to his mind and ...
17
votes
11answers
4k views
Could a predatory semi-sentient species survive, in the long run, without the emotion of fear?
I was thinking of an idea for an alien species in a hard sci-fi universe, and I wondered if a species, with the same amount of emotions as bottlenose dolphins (Except for fear), survive as a species.
...
25
votes
13answers
10k views
Seven Deadly Sins As Virtues? [closed]
A series I found when trawling TV Tropes had as a theme that the Seven Deadly Sins (Pride, Lust, Greed, Envy, Sloth, Gluttony, and Wrath for the unfamiliar) could be virtues if controlled properly. ...
40
votes
15answers
10k views
What would convince people to solve disputes with a deadly card game?
Let's consider that the card game needs to be played, and equipment that may even kill you if you lose (via blades, electric shocks or the like, it could also even kill people by summoning ...
12
votes
8answers
875 views
What would be the psychological differences between a human and an intelligent detrivore?
I am still working on my intelligent detrivore alien species and so far I have gotten some great help from you guys. But after searching online a lot about detrivore psychology I still cannot find ...
4
votes
4answers
321 views
What would the psychological effects be on a child who grew up knowing they could never really get hurt?
(This question goes more in depth from a previous question.)
Imagine This:
The "Black Box" is a mind vault for a few humans who created it, the humans wanting to survive a nuclear war happening on ...
8
votes
6answers
573 views
How would Ophiocordyceps unilateralis need to be modified to make a realistic “The Last of Us” apocalypse scenario?
In the story I am writing, the United States never pulled out of Vietnam, with the conflict continuing into the present day. During this time, the United States decided to use Vietnam to secretly ...
0
votes
2answers
75 views
Multiple insect psychology [closed]
So I am making up a human that has been hybridized with some insect species and I was wondering what the psychological consequences of these separate minds being put together would be (of course the ...
-5
votes
1answer
326 views
What would cause a 'talking head' to die? [closed]
This is a short story, situated in the near (third or fourth millennium) future.
An absolutely brilliant mathematician is working on a unified system of mathematics. One that ties all of the fields ...
2
votes
2answers
307 views
Effect of Stalemate on Soldiers' Morale
I'm dabbling with a short story involving two large but sparsely populated nations locked in a bitter war. Due to limitations of resources, technology, and terrain, neither side can conquer and hold ...
